A while ago I was looking at my router’s log and noticed a funny thing related to DHCP entries, namely those of Nintendo Wii. Apparently Wii acts a little weird when it comes to DHCP, making constant queries to the server on short intervals.

My Wii has the WiiConnect24 on, so it should make Internet connections regularly, no problem there. There’s just no need to bombard the router with address queries every few minutes. Compared to other devices on my network, Wii sure makes itself heard.

If Wii has no IP-address set to it, the ideal procedure would be to make a query, accept the address and hold it until the lease expires or it’s otherwise necessary to make a new query. Wii seems to think this method is too obvious and keeps on making new queries when it feels like it. Now, once the server receives another query from Wii, it (naturally) gives it the same address again, since the address hasn’t expired and the client is the same one.

Wii is not still not satisfied, however, and continues this redundant process of DHCP queries. I noticed this behaviour a long ago, shortly after I bought Wii. Then I thought it might perhaps have something to do with the router or DHCP settings and didn’t give it much thought. However when I recently changed my primary router, Wii’s behaviour caught my eye once again.

The previous router is still working as a wireless access point, but no longer handles the DHCP-queries. Those duties now belong to the new router. Wii’s behaviour towards DHCP has remained the same despite the change in DHCP server. The IP-address lease period is 72 hours and after 36 hours have passed the client should try to renew the lease. Wii apparently doesn’t know how read a clock.

Here’s a portion of Wii’s network activity log of six hours, 13.00-19.00. Now, I’m not going to print the whole thing, would serve no purpose. I’ll clip a few entries from the between because – besides time – each entry is identical to the previous and following one.

There. Based on the logs it would seem that Wii queries IP-address from the server more than 10 times per hour. Generally the interval is less than 10 minutes.

As a comparison, here’s iPod Touch’s entires from the same time period:

We can see that iPod Touch makes a DHCP query for the server approximately every hour. While even this is much considering the lease period, in this light Wii’s behaviour is rather odd. Especially since the DHCP server has no special settings for either device.

Then we come to the million dollar questions, what’s the point of all this & who cares? To be frank, the answers to these are probably “nothing” and “no one”. Just a curiosity, although I’m not the only one who’s wondered the same thing.

This makes me wonder if the behaviour is simply a flaw in Wii’s DHCP client, an intentional choice by Nintendo or something completely different. Let’s face it, iPod Touch makes 10 DHCP requests on the same time period where Wii makes well over 60 queries.

Makes also wonder how this affects router performance in a situation where, let’s say multiple Wii’s have the WiiConnect24 on and keep on pounding the same DHCP server constantly. Nonetheless, the traffic is redundant and keeps on filling my router log files for no good reason.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Articles, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.