a. Without using ARP, system A needs to send 10 broadcast frames. Each of the
18 other systems need to receive the frames, decapsulate the frames, remove
the datagram and pass it to their network-layer to find out the datagrams do
not belong to them.This means processing and discarding 180 broadcast
frames.
b. Using ARP, system A needs to send only one broadcast frame. Each of the 18
other systems need to receive the frames, decapsulate the frames, remove the
ARP message and pass the message to their ARP protocol to find that the frame
must be discarded. This means processing and discarding only 18 (instead of
180) broadcast frames. After system B responds with its own data-link address,
system A can store the link-layer address in its cache memory. The rest of the
nine frames are only unicast. Since processing broadcast frames is expensive
(time consuming), the first method is preferable.