Cellular IP address provisioning in a heterogeneous wireless network

In this article, we propose a dynamic Internet Protocol (IP) address assignment architecture for heterogeneous wireless IP devices network. The IP device could be a sensor device, a laptop, a cell phone, or any wireless device using IP communications. The proposed architecture introduces security and service reliability to the consumer while reducing the operational expenditure for the service providers. According to the proposed scheme, each node maintains an IP address pool storing the current occupancy of each IP address. Each node advertises its database whenever the ratio of negative acknowledgments from the domain name server to the total number of requests at a given node exceeds a certain threshold. We evaluate our IP assignment scheme under two traffic intensity scenarios, namely the uniform traffic intensity and the heterogeneous traffic intensity. Performance evaluation is carried out with respect to blocking probability and average IP list utilization. We define three types of blocking probability for the user requests as follows: The real blocking, the unjustified acceptance, and the unjustified rejection. We observe that the proposed scheme outperforms the uniform assignment as long as the threshold is below 1.5% for the uniform intensity scenario and 1% for the heterogeneous scenario. Furthermore, this architecture considers the security aspect of the wireless network by allowing only registered devices to communicate with other registered devices. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.