As an update/info for anyone coming across this thread later:
I now have stable presence detection of android devices running Nougat 7.1.1, and LineageOS 14, and Apple devices on iOS 10.3.3 using the network binding. As pointed out by @rlkoshak and @Confused, arp just needs to be correctly configured.
Setup is on a Rpi3 using the openhab(2.2) image.
The installed arping tool did not wake the 7.1.1 or iOS devices, but did wake the LineageOS. The iputils-arping tool woke one of the 7.1.1 but not the other or the iOS device. This was based on ping and arping tests from the command line.
Updated the arping tool to v2.19-3 (was 2.14) - tested again, and all devices responded to arping after going into sleep mode, despite not responding to ping (as expected).
For network binding to work:
Added sudo nopasswd permissions using “su visudo” then "chmod u+s /usr/sbin/arping"
On the network things, increased retry value to 10, and timeout value to 20000.
Tested overnight and all devices stayed active for 12+hours. Based on the logs, it looks like the 7.1.1 devices can stop responding for 4-6 mins so a retry value of 10 looks reasonable.
Thanks for the pushing me in the right direction guys,much better solution.