ARP considered harmful: manycast transactions in ad hoc networks

ARP handles neighbor discovery and address resolution in infrastructure networks, but is inadequate for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Thus, many MANET routing protocols include a neighbor discovery mechanism. This separation of neighbor discovery and address resolution is a fundamental design problem that causes packet loss, particularly when the communication is manycast, a novel variant of multicast communication. Our approach, automatic address resolution, moves address resolution into the routing protocol along with neighbor discovery, correcting these problems.