Analytical Modeling of Address Allocation Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks - (Invited Paper)

A detailed description of the Internet Protocol Address Assignment (IPAA) is presented and state diagrams for its behavior constructed. Formulae for the expected latency and communication overhead of the IPAA protocol are derived, with the results being given as functions of the number of nodes in the network with message loss rate, contention window size, coverage ratio, and the counter threshold as parameters. The IPAA and MANET Configuration (MANETconf) are compared in detail. The results show that the latency and communication overhead for MANETconf are significantly higher than for the IPAA protocol. Results of extensive sensitivity analyses for the IPAA protocol are also presented.