Comparative analysis of neighbor greeting protocols: ARP versus ES-IS

Neighbor greeting involves a process used by network nodes to achieve reachability and discovery. The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and End-System to Intermediate-System Routing Exchange Protocol (ES-IS) are competing approaches to the neighbor greeting problem. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the performance of these protocols, and a better understanding of the performance tradeoffs that distinguish systems which rely on demand based binding, versus those which rely on passive binding using advertisements. Results presented in this paper suggest that significantly enhanced services are provided to connectionless network-layer entities by ES-IS relative to ARP based schemes. These findings provide insights applicable to the design of future address resolution protocols in an internetwork environment.