Experience-with autoconfiguring a network with IP addresses

Abstract

To make future tactical battlefield networks more agile, flexible and robust, nodes must rapidly configure themselves with little or no human intervention,moreover they must reconfigure automatically as the environment changes. We present our approach to configuring and reconfiguring an entire network domain, possibly consisting of tens of thousands of hosts and routers, based on a new dynamical configuration distribution protocol (DCDP). DCDP automatically distributes address-pools and other IP configuration information to every subnet in a domain, where a subnet configuration protocol can configure each node in a subnet. This paper describes the first implementation of DCDP and shows how, with the subnet configuration protocol DRCP, it rapidly configured IP addresses to Linux hosts and routers.