Performance evaluation of stateful address auto-configuration protocols in Ad hoc networks

Address auto-configuration process is one of the most essential issues for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). Before nodes participate in multi-hop or internet communications, they must be assigned an IP address. Uniqueness and fast assignment of the IP addresses in MANETs are the main topics of the auto-configuration process. The Logical Hierarchical Addressing (LHA) protocol was proposed to handle these topics in MANETs. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce the enhanced algorithms of the LHA protocol and to evaluate its performance results obtained from the Ns2 implementation. Our analysis shows that the performance results of the enhanced LHA are stable under any scenario and it reduces the latency to obtain an IP address compared to the MANETconf and Prophet protocols. In addition, LHA has less protocol overheads if it is compared to other protocols. Moreover, the introduced merging algorithm of the enhanced LHA shows that the protocol is able to handle special scenarios, such as the merging of more than two networks simultaneously.