ROUTING DOMAIN AUTOCONFIGURATION FOR MORE EFFICIENT AND RAPIDLY DEPLOYABLE MOBILE NETWORKS

One approach to achieving scalability in rapidly deployed dynamic networks, such as Future Combat Systems (FCS), is to automatically divide nodes into small (e.g., 30 node) interconnected IP domains and assigning each a routing protocol that best meets the domain’s characteristics (Morera and McAuley, 2002). Although an attractive idea, it has not been tested. This paper presents the first realization of domain autoconfiguration through extensions to the IP Autoconfiguration Suite (IPAS) (McAuley et al., 2001; McAuley et al., 2002; Cheng et al., 2002). While IPAS already configures and reconfigures information such as interface IP address and server locations, it assumes a single domain. We describe IPAS enhancements that support the automatic creation and configuration of multiple domains and describe a prototype implementation where interfaces are dynamically assigned to run different routing protocols. Finally, we show some initial performance results that show configuration time for even large (1000 node) sparse networks in a few seconds and small bandwidth overhead (a few hundred bytes per link).