I eventually figured out that the arp, being a cache table, flushes itself periodically, which is why this method rarely succeeded. Btw it was taking like 30 secs, even while trying with 'start ping'.

The problem was my IP range had 60k+ possible IP address and after scanning all of them (which was not so simple, and really ugly with the start command) the arp table was really poorly populated. I tried the technique of pinging all subnet and then do an arp command. A lot of answers like M.S.Aruns's all over stackoverflow and elsewhere, but nobody explains them, nor explains the solution correctly (IMHO). I had this problem for retrieveing some virtual machines IP address for which all I had was the MAC address. How do I get the Android phone to appear in the arp table (without doing anything from it besides connecting to WiFi)? But I don't have the option to manually do that everytime I want it to appear in the arp table. I tried requesting 192.168.0.100 (IP of my desktop PC) from the phone's browser, and that sure enough puts the phone on the radar. The problem is it doesn't show up in the table! I tried ping 192.168.0.255 but it still doesn't show up. So I'm trying arp -a and searching for my phone's MAC address so I can get its IP from the table. I'm trying to write a batch file that's supposed to find the dynamically assigned IP of my Android phone when it's connected to the network (Tenda WiFi router).

How to get ip address of macbook