In the IP protocol stack the lowest level protocol is ARP (the Address Resolution Protocol). ARP is used to request the Ethernet hardware (MAC) address of the host which owns a particular IP address.
# arping 192.168.0.43 ARPING 192.168.0.43 60 bytes from 00:60:b0:3c:62:6b (192.168.0.43): index=0 time=339.031 usec 60 bytes from 00:60:b0:3c:62:6b (192.168.0.43): index=1 time=12.967 msec […]