Quorum Based IP Address Autoconfiguration in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

IP address autoconfiguration poses a challenge for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) since it has to be done to ensure correct routing. Protocols for IP address autoconfiguration can be classified into two categories. In the stateless category, nodes in the network do not keep IP allocation information, thus duplicate address detection (DAD) is used to resolve possible address conflicts. Protocols in the stateful category require nodes, cooperatively or separately, to maintain state information and ensure address uniqueness. They use either a full replication or no replication scheme to maintain IP information. In this paper, we propose a quorum based IP address autoconfiguration protocol in MANETs using partial replication. Making the compromise between message overhead and data consistency, quorum voting enforces data consistency by ensuring a fresh read upon every access so that each node is configured with a unique IP address. The protocol is scalable and no central server is involved. Extensive experiments are implemented comparing the configuration latency, message overhead and address reclamation cost between our protocol and existing stateful protocols. The simulation results show that nodes are configured in lower latency and the message overhead for maintaining the network is fairly low. Moreover, the proposed protocol greatly enhances the address availability by keeping proper redundancy.