William Allen Simpson wrote:
After so many times reinventing the wheel, IP uber alles is a better goal. Speaking as somebody familiar with the effort.
I'm afraid you misunderstand my point.
John Gilmore recently gave a good history of the ARP origin.
ARP is perfectly good for CSMA/CD but not so good for CSMA/CA where broadcast/multicast is unreliable. So, with wifi, we should rely on repeated beacon from base stations for AR of the base stations and rely on unicast from clients to register them to base stations, which should act as proxy for communications between clients, which is a totally different protocol from ARP. Without such recognition today, wifi users should be suffering from some inefficiencies when link is congested, which is often the case. Other link technology should also require AR mechanism of its own. As such, performing AR with IP is not so meaningful. Worse, even DHCP, which assumes reliable broadcast, does not work so efficiently over congested wifi. Masataka Ohta