SAAMAN: Scalable Address Autoconfiguration in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Address autoconfiguration is one of the fundamental issues in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). A node must need some form of identity before participating in any sort of communication. So each host in a MANET needs to be uniquely addressed so that the packets can be relayed hop-by-hop and delivered ultimately to the desired destination. Moreover, nodes in the MANET are free to move and organize themselves in an arbitrary fashion. Therefore any fixed infrastructure based solution for assigning identity (i.e. IP address) is not directly applicable to MANET. Under this infrastructureless and sporadic nature of the mobile nodes, several protocols of address autoconfiguration in the mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have been proposed. Although some of these protocols perform decently in sparse and small networks, but exhibit poor performance (e.g., single point of failure, storage limitation, large protocol overhead and so on) when the network is either dense or very large. In this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable address autoconfiguration protocol that automatically configures a networkby assigning unique IP addresses to all nodes with a very low overhead and minimal cost. Evenly distributed Duplicate-IP address Detection Servers are used to ensure the uniqueness of an IP address during IP address assignment session. In contrast to some other solutions, the proposed protocol does not exhibit any problems pertaining to leader election or centralized server-based solutions. Furthermore, grid based hierarchy is used for efficient geographic forwarding as well as for selecting Duplicate-IP address Detection Servers. Through simulation results we demonstrate scalability, robustness, low latency, fault tolerance and some other important aspects of our protocol