Is WICED's NetXduo built with NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY?

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Anonymous
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By default WICED only has 6 entries in the ARP table. (See WICED/network/NetX_Duo/WICED/wiced_network.h)

#define ARP_CACHE_SIZE                  (6 * SIZE_OF_ARP_ENTRY)

If you have a lot more than 6 devices on the layer 2 network that are frequently communicating then every one of those devices would be expected to send out ARP requests. By default NetXduo stores the sender of every received ARP request in the ARP table. If there are only 6 entries in the table, the table will quickly fill up with entries from other devices with which a specific device may never intend to communicate and the entries for devices with which it does normally communicate will get overwritten. This means it may have to send an ARP request almost every time it communicates with each IP that it frequently communicates with. This will dramatically slow down communications.

We ran into this problem when developing code on WICED 3.5.1 and have upgraded the code to include newer features in more recent releases of WICED. Back then each of our devices was frequently sending messages to 20, 30 or more IP addresses. An ARP table of 6 was clearly too small for our application. Now we have optimized communication using multicasts, so each device should only be communicating with a small number of IP addresses. Thus an arp table with only 6 entries should be big enough as long as NetXduo's automatic ARP entries are disabled with NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY.

Since NetXduo is a prebuilt library, we don't have control over NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY.

Now that we are upgrading to WICED 6.2, is WICED's NetXduo built with NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY?

See https://rtos.com/wp-content/uploads/secure/NetX_User_Guide.pdf pp 87-88:

ARP Dynamic Entries p 87
By default, the ARP enable service places all entries
in the ARP cache on the list of available dynamic
ARP entries. A dynamic ARP entry is allocated from
this list by NetX Duo when a send request to an
unmapped IP address is detected. After allocation,
the ARP entry is set up and an ARP request is sent to
the physical media.
A dynamic entry can also be created by the service
nx_arp_dynamic_entry_set.
If all dynamic ARP entries are in use, the least
recently used ARP entry is replaced with a new
mapping.
...
Automatic ARP Entry p 88
NetX Duo records the peer’s IP/MAC mapping after the
peer responses to the ARP request. NetX Duo also
implements the automatic ARP entry feature where it
records peer IP/MAC address mapping based on
unsolicited ARP requests from the network. This feature
allows the ARP table to be populated with peer
information, reducing the delay needed to go through
the ARP request/response cycle. However the
downside with enabling automatic ARP is that the ARP
table tend to fill up quickly on a busy network with many
nodes on the local link, which would eventually lead to
ARP entry replacement.
This feature is enabled by default. To disable it, the NetX
Duo library must be compiled with the symbol
NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY defined.

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GauravS_31
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Unfortunately the answer is no. NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY bit in _nx_system_build_options_1 is 0 which means that WICED NetX Duo is not built with NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY enabled.

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GauravS_31
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10 questions asked 250 solutions authored 250 sign-ins

Unfortunately the answer is no. NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY bit in _nx_system_build_options_1 is 0 which means that WICED NetX Duo is not built with NX_DISABLE_ARP_AUTO_ENTRY enabled.