Address allocation to mobile ad hoc networks

Addressing in MANETs is of significant importance, as a mobile device cannot participate in unicast communications until it is assigned a conflict-free IP address. All routing protocols assume nodes to be configured a priori with a unique IP address. Allocating addresses to mobile nodes is a fundamental and difficult problem. Unlike infrastructure based networks, MANETs support autonomous and spontaneous networking and therefore, should be capable of self-organization and self-configuration. We present a new IP based address allocation protocol for MANETs based on quadratic residues. Each node in the network is capable of assigning a unique IP address with low latency. Addresses are reclaimed automatically, as the quadratic residues lie in cycles. This significantly reduces communication overhead and bandwidth. Our approach also has support for network merging and partitioning. The proposed scheme has low communication overhead, even address distribution and low latency when applied to large scale MANETs.