RAA: A Ring-Based Address Autoconfiguration Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The problem for dynamic IP address assignment is manifest in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), especially in 4G all-IP-based heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose a ring-based address autoconfiguration protocol to configure node addresses. This work aims at the decentralized ring-based address autoconfiguration (DRAA) protocol, which has the capability to perform low latency and whose broadcast messages are reduced to lower control overhead. In addition, we introduce the centralized ring-based address autoconfiguration (CRAA) protocol to largely diminish control overhead and to serve as an even solution for IP address resource distribution. Both of DRAA and CRAA protocols are low-latency solutions because each node independently allocates partial IP addresses and does not need to perform the duplicate addresses detection (DAD) during the node-join operation. Communication overhead is significantly lessened in that RAA (DRAA and CRAA) protocols use the logical ring, thus utilizing fewer control messages solely by means of uni-cast messages to distribute address resources and to retrieve invalid addresses. Especially, the CRAA protocol reduces larger numbers of broadcast messages during network merging. The other important contribution is that our CRAA protocol also has an even capability so that address resources can be evenly distributed in each node in networks; this accounts for the reason our solution is suitable for large-scale networks. Finally, the performance analysis illustrates performance achievements of RAA protocols.