• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.659-672
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• 2004

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a group of independent mobile computing nodes that consist of a multi-hop wireless network without a central administration or any infrastructure. Every node that wants to join a MANET must obtain an address for communication. Having a centralized DHCP server that provides addresses to nodes, we can easily and automatically obtain addresses. However, a MANET lacks any fixed infrastructure such as a DHCP server. We therefore propose a distributed address autoconfiguration approach for a MANET using a reserved address and optimistic Duplicated Address Detection (DAD). The reserved address helps to reduce the allocation latency, and the optimistic DAD guarantees the uniqueness of addresses and lessens communication overhead. We then suggest methods of handling network partition and network merging situations, and go on to evaluate our approach through simulations. The simulation result shows that our scheme guarantees the uniqueness of allocated address and considerably improves allocation latency and communication overheads.