Self-Organising Node Address Management in Ad Hoc Networks

Whilst much effort has been put into the creation of routing algorithms to handle all sorts of mobility scenarios in ad-hoc networks, other fundamental issues, such as the addresses used by nodes, haven’t been dealt with adequately. This addressing problem has recently attracted increased attention and a few proposals have been made, though often these schemes only work in limited scenarios. In this paper we present an autoconfiguration protocol designed to work in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). The scheme allows joining nodes to dynamically obtain addresses, and has been designed to efficiently manage addressing, and to handle such scenarios as the merging and partitioning of networks. We discuss an implementation used within an emulated environment and a real self-organising ad-hoc network.