Autonomic DHCPv6 Architecture

The complexity of new services pushes traditional network management processes beyond scalability, autonomic networking being an answer to these challenges. Within the EFIPSANS project, funded by European Commission (EC), we have proposed the Generic Autonomic Network Architecture (GANA) - an Architectural Reference Model for Autonomic Networking and Self-Management, which offers a modular solution to designing autonomic networks that exhibit self-management capabilities. In this paper, we focus on the particular issue of autonomic address configuration of future networks. Currently IPv6 stateless auto-configuration provides addresses for end-hosts only, however in an autonomic network, the operator would expect that the network configures all its routers and the connected hosts without user interaction. We present in detail our solution, which executes this task in an automated fashion. Our proposal is an extension of the current DHCPv6 protocol in order to automatically configure an entire local area network. We have drafted a dedicated scenario, called Automatic DHCP Architecture (ADA) that shows the benefits of our proposal. We have implemented our solution and we run several experiments in our testbed to assess the performance of our proposal.