Self-configuring networks

To make future tactical battlefield networks more flexible and robust, nodes must rapidly configure themselves with little or no human intervention and reconfigure automatically as the environment changes. This paper describes the dynamic registration and configuration protocol (DRCP) and dynamic address allocation protocol (DAAP) that together can provide true stateless autoconfiguration of an entire network domain. We first describe DRCP which extends DHCP into new domains such as wireless networks and commercial service providers. We then describe DAAP, which distributes addresses and other configuration parameters to DRCP servers. Although kept much simpler by relying on DRCP we show DAAP must still be carefully designed to ensure robustness while maintaining enough address hierarchy to reduce routing protocol overhead. Implementations of DRCP and DAAP on a Linux PC platform are described.