Resilient JPv6 Multicast Address Allocation in Ad Hoc Networks

Multicast address allocation in the Internet has been the focus of much research and standardization. However, the multicast address allocation problem has been overlooked in ad hoc networking research. In this paper, we survey approaches to solving the multicast address allocation problem and analyze the security characteristics of the proposals. We show that using random assignment in IPv6 based ad hoc networks for multicast address allocation is more secure and bandwidth efficient than the previous proposals. We use passive listening to obtain network prefixes for autoconfiguring a global multicast address. The ideas presented in this paper are useful for practical deployment of ad hoc networks