A fast mobile node configuration using address caching in hybrid wireless networks

Many small devices in a pervasive computing environment have various wireless network interfaces that are used to exchange data for various network services. Recently, those devices usually compose an ad hoc network and communicate with each other without any infrastructure. Several host configuration methods for mobile nodes in a mobile ad hoc network without user´s manual intervention have been suggested so far. If the number of ad hoc nodes in a network increases, it take long time for a newly joining node to configure itself with Zeroconf (A. Williams, 2002) or DHCP (R. Droms, 1997) server since the request messages for address allocation should be transmitted via multiple hops. In this paper, we propose a distributed host configuration scheme in which each ad hoc node temporarily caches host configuration information to reduce traffic sent to real (Zeroconf or DHCP) server and to shorten message delay between a node and a server.