Wireless-Network-Integrated Attendance Verification and Zone-Based Access Governance for University Laboratories Using ARP Table Polling, Subnet Isolation, and Containerised Cloud Services

University laboratory management continues to suffer from inefficiencies introduced by manual attendance procedures, including fraudulent proxy sign-ins, delayed data availability, and a complete absence of network-tier access governance. This paper describes the design, construction, and empirical evaluation of a Wireless-Network-Integrated Attendance and Zone Access System (WNIAZAS) that resolves these deficiencies through periodic polling of the gateway ARP cache combined with lightweight subnet isolation techniques. When a student device associates with the laboratory wireless access point, the gateway router populates its ARP table with a binding between the device hardware address and the allocated IP. A polling daemon written in Go queries this binding table at configurable intervals, compares discovered hardware addresses against a pre-enrolled device registry held in a PostgreSQL database deployed on an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment, and inserts timestamped presence records. Subnet isolation enforces departmental boundaries through IP address pool segregation enforced at the DHCP scope level, with firewall rules blocking inter-subnet forwarding for unauthorised source addresses. A one-time-password check-in portal implemented in Node.js with Express serves students connecting through cellular data. An administrative dashboard built on React with Server-Sent Events delivers sub-five-second latency attendance updates to department coordinators. Evaluation across ten functional scenarios records a 100 percent detection rate for enrolled devices and zero missed violation events. ARP polling introduces a median attendance-recording latency of 1.4 seconds. End-to-end dashboard refresh latency averages 2.1 seconds under a concurrency load of fifty simultaneous sessions. The deployment operates within the AWS Free Tier resource envelope, demonstrating that production-quality automated attendance infrastructure incurs negligible marginal cost in institutions that already operate managed wireless networks