An address autoconfiguration protocol for IPv6 hosts in a mobile ad hoc network

A mobile ad hoc network is an infrastructure-free wireless network that is built on the fly. Since central administration or configuration by the users is impractical in such networks, autoconfiguration of network nodes is highly desirable. In this paper, we propose an approach to IPv6 address autoconfiguration in ad hoc networks, where we apply the IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration Protocol and Neighbour Discovery Protocol to the context of ad hoc networks. It overcomes some of the limitations of existing protocols. In particular, we consider the scenarios of network partitioning and merging. A distributed scheme for duplicate address detection is also discussed. We evaluate the performance of our solution through simulation experiments.