The Ethernet directly supports the sending of local multicast packets by allowing multicast addresses in the destination field of Ethernet packets. All that is needed to support the sending of multicast IP datagrams is a procedure for mapping IP host group addresses to Ethernet multicast addresses.
An IP host group address is mapped to an Ethernet multicast address by placing the low-order 23-bits of the IP address into the low-order 23 bits of the Ethernet multicast address 01-00-5E-00-00-00 (hex). Because there are 28 significant bits in an IP host group address, more than one host group address may map to the same Ethernet multicast address.