An autoconfiguration architecture for mobile Ad Hoc networks

Abstract

$\It{Addressing and naming} are fundamental elements in making use of network facilities. Every network node must configure its network interface with a unique address in order to communicate with other nodes. In addition, many applications run with name resolution because human beings are familiar with names rather than numbers and naming helps people to easily and conveniently use their applications. Network hosts and devices have historically been difficult to configure, and what is more, the proliferation of wireless networks and wireless devices with mobility makes it more difficult to configure network hosts and devices. To alleviate those configuration problems, server-based automatic configuration protocols, such as DHCP and DNS, have been introduced. However, in mobile ad hoc network environment, we must devise novel protocols without servers to support addressing and naming because MANET lacks the fixed infrastructure such as DHCP and DNS servers. This dissertation proposes two protocols to provide address autoconfiguration and name resolution, respectively, to MANET users. First, for address autoconfiguration, we propose a novel address autoconfiguration protocol (AROD) with address reservation and optimistic DAD in order to reduce address configuration time and communication overhead as well as to guarantee uniqueness of allocated address. Address reservation makes it possible to decouple DAD process from address configuration phase, and then this leads to fast address configuration. In addition, AROD minimizes the number of DAD trials through using Optimistic DAD. We showed performance improvement of AROD through numerical analysis and simulation studies using ns-2 simulator in terms of uniqueness of configured addresses, average configuration time, and communication overhead. Second, for name resolution, in order to support both addressing and name resolution, we propose a name-based address autoconfiguration, NBA. In NBA, the address ca...