A Secure Autoconfiguration Scheme for Merging Independent Adhoc Networks

All the nodes in the adhoc network may move randomly and able to join or leave any network, nodes in adhoc networks are operating as routers and workstation. Nodes are capable to discover and maintain routes to every other node in the network and to propagate packets accordingly. Autoconfiguration of mobile nodes is an important issue on self configurable networks. Autoconfiguration is needed to identify mobile nodes in the network uniquely. This is a critical problem to assign unique IP addresses to the mobile nodes when two or more than two independent adhoc networks merges to form a single network. Because when two independent mobile adhoc networks are merged then it may be possible that these independent networks have the nodes with a common IP address which results in IP address conflict. The problem arises when a malicious node request to participate in the ethos network and if this node is allowed to participate then the performance of the network is degraded because of the false information propagated to other nodes from this malicious node. So when a network is merged to another network then it is required to check whether the node is malicious or not. If the node(s) not malicious then only reconfiguration algorithm is applied. Most of the approaches available in the literature for secure autoconfiguration of IP addresses are based on single mobile adhoc network. In this paper we have proposed a new methodology for secure autoconfiguration of mobile nodes in the case of merging.