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I was looking to find the role of ARP whenever say we want to access a website like google.com. I found some answers here.

But, when I tried to use Wireshark to check the ARP request I wasn't able to find any ARP requests anywhere near the DNS query of the google.com. I am actually new to Wireshark, and I am not sure if this is what it is supposed to show, also Is there any way to find the MAC address of the next hop the packets will take, from my knowledge it uses ARP for this, but I am not able to see those in WireShark.

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Your PC only sends an ARP request for hosts on the local network. For all destinations on other networks, the PC sends the packet to the default gateway.

Your PC will send an ARP request for the default gateway if there is no entry in the ARP table. But that usually only occurs when your PC is first turned on.

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  • Thanks, for the response. Could you clarify if it is possible to observe the next hop the packet is going to take using software like Wireshark, is that message embedded somewhere in the packet header?
    – Vedanta Mohapatra
    Aug 30 at 18:47
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    That happens at layer 2. If you capture the Ethernet or Wi-Fi frame, you'll see the destination MAC address is the gateway MAC.
    – Ron Trunk
    Aug 30 at 19:12
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ARP is only ever used to resolve local IP addresses to their corresponding MAC address. Any MAC addresses used outside your local network are useless and generally unknown.

When communicating with hosts outside your network you send all packets to your router as gateway and it's (only) that IP address that is ARPed.

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  • Thanks, for the response. Could you clarify if it is possible to observe the next hop the packet is going to take using software like Wireshark, is that message embedded somewhere in the packet header?
    – Vedanta Mohapatra
    Aug 30 at 18:47
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    Any packet going through a gateway carries the gateway's MAC address as destination in its encapsulating frame.
    – Zac67 ♦
    Aug 30 at 19:36

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