Quadratic Residue Based Address Allocation for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Address allocation in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) receives significant importance recently, as a mobile device cannot participate in unicast communications until it is assigned with a conflict free IP address. All routing protocols assume nodes to be configured a priori with a unique IP address. Unlike infrastructure based networks, MANET supports autonomous and spontaneous networking and therefore, should be capable of self organization and configuration. We present a new address allocation protocol in MANET based on the concept of quadratic residue. Each node in the network is capable of assigning a unique IP address with low latency. Addresses are reclaimed automatically, as the quadratic residues lie in cycles. This saves lot of extra communication overhead and bandwidth. Our approach also has support for network merging and partitioning. The proposed scheme can be applied to large scale MANETs with low communication overhead, even distribution, and low latency.