LBAA: Level based address auto-configuration for ad hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are infrastructure-less, multi-hop wireless networks. Nodes in the MANET have to be configured with unique addresses for unicast communications. As the nodes are mobile, the centralized administration does not suit for auto-configuration. So, we need a distributed address auto-configuration scheme for MANETs. Most of the existing schemes use DAD to ensure uniqueness, which consumes a lot of bandwidth which, in turn, causes energy wastage. In this paper, we propose the LBAA scheme which uses a large pool of unique addresses at each node with negligible space complexity. This scheme can be extended to large-scale MANETs with 100% uniqueness in address allocation. DAD is not needed for our scheme as each node maintains a dis-joint set of addresses. In the simulation results, we show that LBAA performs best in guaranteeing uniqueness and performs quite well in energy efficiency, allocation latency and nodes configured ratio.