Privacy addressing and autoconfiguration for mobile ad hoc networks

Allowing truly spontaneous and infrastructureless networking, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are the future of wireless networks. However, most autoconfiguration proposals for MANETs lack privacy support, namely anonymity or pseudonymity and unlinkability aspects, which has become important considerations in many practical applications. This paper presents a novel privacy extension approach (PEA) for MANETs, which prevents eavesdroppers from identifying a particular mobile node by its address. In addition to privacy concerns, our scheme also brings some performance benefits, e.g., reducing the possibility of address conflict when the merging of separately configured networks occurs.