Localized address autoconfiguration in wireless ad hoc networks

We propose a localized address autoconfiguration (LaConf) scheme for wireless ad hoc networks. Address allocation information is maintained on the network border nodes, called addressing agents (AAs), which are locally identified by geographic routing protocol GFG [2]. When a node joins the network, it acquires an address from a neighboring AA (if any exists) by local communication or from the head AA (a geographic extreme AA) by GFG-based multi-hop communication. Geographic Hash Table (GHT) [19] is adopted for duplicate address detection. Each address is hashed to a unique location in the network field, and the associated assignment information is stored along the face perimeter enclosing that location (in the planar graph used). When a node receives an address assignment, it consults with the perimeter nodes around the hash location of the assigned address about any conflict. AAs detect network partition and merger locally according to neighborhood change and trigger AA re-selection and network re-configuration (if necessary). We evaluate LaConf through simulation using different planar graphs. We also propose to apply connected dominating set (CDS) [3] concept to improve the performance.