Patent ID: 8359376

Claim:
A method of proactively sending an IP address to MAC address binding for a high fan-in node, the method comprising: determining, by a processor, whether a node is a high fan-in node; if the node is determined to be the high fan-in node, proactively and periodically sending the node's IP address to MAC address binding to nodes in a network; if the node is not determined to be the high fan-in node, sending the node's IP address to MAC address binding to a first node in the network in response to the node receiving a request for the node's IP address to MAC address binding from the first node; determining timeouts for nodes in the network sending the requests for the node's IP address to MAC address binding to the node, wherein each timeout is a period of time the binding is considered valid; and determining a periodicity for the periodic sending of the node's IP address to MAC address binding to the nodes in the network based on the timeouts, wherein the periodicity is set to a rate faster than a shortest timeout of the timeouts.