Review of stateful address auto configuration protocols in MANETs

In wireless networks, the nodes can interact with each other only if they are in each other’s communication range. Thus, each node need to periodically broadcast beacon message to identify which all nodes are in its communication range. The beacon message contains the identity (i.e. IP address of node) of the node. This identity is provided by the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) servers in case of infrastructure networks but in the adhoc networks, no such DHCP servers exists due to the absence of any centralized infrastructure. Thus, there exists a need of auto configuration protocols in mobile adhoc networks (MANETs) that can uniquely allocate an IP address to all the participating nodes. Apart from the address allocation, the auto configuration protocols also need to resolve duplicate addresses during mergers as well as to reclaim the IP address whenever a node leaves the network. The aim of this paper is to give the detail insight of most of the auto configuration protocols that exist in the literature and to discuss their advantages as well as their shortcomings.