Agent-Based Passive Autoconfiguration for Large Scale MANETs

The autoconfiguration algorithm of the mobile node addresses is important in the practical usage of most mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The passive Duplicate Address Detection (PDAD) protocols can detect address conflicts in a passive manner and thus have very low protocol overhead. However, the blindly random assignment algorithm used in PDAD leads to a high initial conflict probability. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of address agent, based on which arises a novel autoconfiguration approach, to obtain the least address conflict probability. Most features of PDAD are inherited, e.g., address conflicts are still detected in a passive manner based on anomalies in routing protocol traffic. Analysis and simulation show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods.