Evaluation of router address autoconfiguration time during network initialization for centralized and distributed schemes

Ever increasing network complexity and/or lack of network managers in a given organization justify the need for autoconfiguration mechanisms. IPv6 already provides mechanisms for autonomous address configuration of end-hosts. However, router address autoconfiguration is still lacking. This paper addresses this issue by studying the no administration protocol (NAP) distributed mechanism and comparing it to centralized mechanisms. Particularly, the evaluation is focused on the time it takes to distribute prefix information to all the nodes when powering up the network. A study on the dependency of this time on some characteristics of the network is also presented. Results show that, for the simulated scenarios, NAP performs better than centralized mechanisms, though, in some cases, the difference is not very important.