A Study of various Address Allocation Schemes for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Roshan Rohit, Dinesh Kumar Singh · 2014
A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure less self-organizing network, in which each node functions as an end host and a wireless relay. This type of wireless network is formed by mobile nodes without any existing infrastructure setup. The nodes in the MANET will require mutually exclusive identities before participating in any form of communication. In particular, each node in the network needs a unique address so that the data packets can be routed hop by hop and delivered ultimately to the destination. The routing protocols which are available in MANETs have all assumed a priori that mobile nodes are configured with a valid (conflict free) network address. Because of the multi-hop routing, the MAC address at the link layer level cannot serve for this purpose. On the other hand, address allocation schemes in wired networks, such as DHCP, needs a centralized DHCP server. It doesn't work well for MANETs due to the mobility of the nodes and the lack of a central authority. Address assignment is a key problem in ad hoc networks due to the lack of infrastructure. Autonomous addressing protocols need a distributed and self-managed mechanism in order to avoid address collisions in a dynamic network with fading channels, frequent partitions, and joining/leaving nodes. There have been several approaches proposed for the dynamic addressing scheme. However, mostly all approaches depend on broadcasting for address solicitation and/or duplicate address detection.