Routing in MANETs with address conflicts

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamic and multi-hop in nature. As nodes continually join and leave the MANET, managing the problem of address conflicts is particularly challenging. In the past, researchers have gone to great lengths to ensure that nodes are assigned unique addresses and various protocols and policies have been designed to resolve address conflicts. In this paper, we argue that current solutions, originally designed for static wired networks, put unnecessary stress on the dynamic operation of a MANET. To solve, this problem, we present a MANET that can continue to operate even when there are conflicting addresses. Unlike previous solutions, our technique does not break applications by requiring nodes to renumber. Further, the overheads introduced by traditional address allocation and maintenance protocols are removed. All these improvements are effected by introducing of a new routing sub-layer that enables a reactive routing protocol to route packets through a MANET that is experiencing address conflicts. This routing sub-layer provides features such as conflict avoidance forwarding, conflict notification, and enhanced address resolution.