WatchOS 5 Beta staying connected to wifi/making lots of DHCP requests?

I was looking through our network logs and found that one of our devices, a coworker's Apple Watch, was showing up a lot in our DHCP logs – and often too, on the order of dozens of times within a few minutes. Yesterday alone, it requested an IP address from our DHCP server 1220 times. I looked into it a bit more, and had my coworker walk around the office (our main office space is roughly toroidal), and sure enough I saw a DHCP request for every access point from here to there and back again.


I got a list of the number of DHCP requests per day and found a correlation:


June 2nd and before: 2-10 requests per day (usually less than 5)

June 4th: WatchOS 5 Beta 1 released

June 4th to 19th: 550-950 requests per day

June 19th: WatchOS 5 Beta 2 released

June 20th to July 2nd: 10-70 requests per day (usually less than 20)

July 3rd: WatchOS 5 Beta 3 released

July 3rd to July 17th: 200-500 requests per day

July 17th: WatchOS 5 Beta 4 released


My coworker installed Beta 4 this morning, but I saw a huge burst in traffic yesterday (possibly due to meetings, or maybe pre-downloading the upgrade?)


Has anyone else seen this kind of behaviour on their WatchOS test devices? It seems to be a bug or feature change related to WatchOS 5, but I'm not sure why his watch is working so hard to stay on the wifi the whole time.