[ns] ARP question

[Robin Poss <robin@ee.cornell.edu>]

Hello.
Does anyone know how a real arp works?

The current arp works as follows: if a packet arrives and needs
the MAC address of a certain destination, an ARP request is sent
and the packet is stored in a buffer. Now if another packet
arrives that needs the same MAC address, the previous packet is
dropped, and the last packet arrived is stored in the buffer.

I was wondering if in real-life ARPs there is a queue of some
kind which can store more than one packet while the ARP is
fetching a certain MAC address?

I'm working on an Ad-Hoc routing protocol and I hope it will be
a contribution to ns some day, and so I would like to know
whether it would be better:
-to have my protocol work with the current ARP
-or to contribute the current version of my protocol + the
correction I made to ARP (I added a queue: ARP doesn't drop any
packets anymore.)

here is the comment that can be found in ARP.cc (in today's
snapshot)
/*
	 *  We don't have a MAC address for this node.  Send an ARP Request.
	 *
	 *  XXX: Do I need to worry about the case where I keep ARPing
	 *	 for the SAME destination.
*/

Thanks,
-- 
Robin