A Secure Addressing Scheme for Large-Scale Managed MANETs

In this paper, we propose a low-overhead identity-based distributed dynamic address configuration scheme for secure allocation of IP addresses to authorized nodes of a managed mobile ad hoc network. A new node will receive an IP address from an existing neighbor node. Thereafter, each node in a network is able to generate a set of unique IP addresses from its own IP address, which it can further assign to more new nodes. Due to lack of infrastructure, apart from security issues, such type of networks poses several design challenges such as high packet error rate, network partitioning, and network merging. Our proposed protocol takes care of these issues incurring less overhead as it does not require any message flooding mechanism over the entire MANET. Performance analysis and simulation results show that even with added security mechanisms, our proposed protocol outperforms similar existing protocols.