IPv4 based hierarchical distributive auto-configuration protocol for MANETs

In mobile adhoc networks (MANETs), one of the fundamental issues is to perform the address autoconfiguration for the incoming nodes, as no centralized server exists in MANETs to manage this configuration process. Every node needs to be given a unique IP address so that the new node can communicate with the already existing nodes in the network. The nodes in the MANET are free to move randomly, so that the configuration protocol should be able to manage the configuration of nodes according to their mobility. Furthermore, due to mobility of the nodes, network may sometimes split into different parts and at times different networks may also merge. Therefore, the methods of address assignment used in fixed infrastructure networks are not directly applicable to MANETs. The design of an autoconfiguration protocol in MANETs should be robust enough to handle the network partitions and network mergers. In this paper, we have proposed a Hierarchical Distributive Auto Configuration Protocol that automatically configures a network using IPv4 address space. The proposed protocol is then compared with the existing protocols on the basis of different metrics such as communication overhead, address allocation latency, percentage of configured nodes and percentage of cluster head nodes using OMNET++ simulator.