In Microsoft website, "(v=ws.10).aspx" it mentioned that NIC should have ARP Offload and NS Offload to prevent computer form waking up merely to maintain network presence.
But I've searched all realtek productions, it does have some wireless NIC with "Wake on Wireless LAN" featured, but none of these wireless NIC can support ARP Offload and NS Offload. (Only some wired NIC support ARP offload).
I ask this question because i have a RTL8188CE wireless NIC, though Wake on Wireless LAN is not listed in Realtek website, it does support. I can wake up my computer by sending a magic packet. but unfortunately, it will wake up in about 0.5-2 hours by accident, i don't know why
1 Answer
All of the Broadcom and Atheros Wi-Fi chips built into Macs since probably 2009 support WoWLAN, and any of the Broadcom designs since about 2011 support ARP and Neighbor Solicitation offload. At least under OS X. I don't know if the Boot Camp Windows drivers support this.
So the 802.11ac 3-stream BCM4360 certainly supports everything you're looking for, as does whatever Broadcom chips Apple was using for the last generations of 2- and 3-stream 802.11n before that (BCM4331 maybe?).
By the way, if you have the ability to enter static ARP mappings (or IPv6 neighbor mappings) into your router, you don't need your NIC to support ARP/NS offload. Or if you know the MAC address of the machine you want to wake, and you can run something on the same [W]LAN as the sleeping machine, you don't have to bother with either static ARP mappings or ARP offload.
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