IP address assignment in a mobile ad hoc network

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of identical mobile nodes communicating with each other via wireless links. The network's topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. Such networks may operate in a stand-alone fashion, or may be connected to the larger Internet. In traditional networks, hosts rely on centralized servers like DHCP for configuration, but this cannot be extended to MANETs because of their distributed and dynamic nature. Many schemes have been proposed to solve this problem. Some of these approaches try to extend the IPv6 stateless autoconfiguration mechanism to MANETs, some use flooding the entire network to come up with a unique IP address, and others distribute IP addresses among nodes (using binary split) so that each node can independently configure new nodes. None of these existing solutions consider network partitioning and merging. In this paper, we propose a proactive scheme for dynamic allocation of IP addresses in MANETs. Our solution also uses the concept of binary split and takes into consideration the previously unsolved issues like partitioning and merging and abrupt departure of nodes from the system. We show that our solution is scalable and does not have the limitations of earlier approaches.