IP address assignment in wireless mesh networks

The demand for wireless networks which provide high bandwidth and access to the Internet continues. In recent years, a new class of networks which fulfill these requirements evolved, wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Although WMNs satisfy the demand for high bandwidth and Internet access, there is a further, fundamental factor of success: the simple use. Except for small networks, manual configuration is infeasible. The task of auto configuration includes the assignment of unique addresses, the management of free and assigned addresses, and the autonomous reaction to failures. In this paper we introduce and evaluate a novel auto configuration protocol for WMNs: the Dynamic WMN Configuration Protocol (DWCP). DWCP deals with all mentioned issues for large WMN installations and was deployed and evaluated in a real testbed.