A SURVEY ON AUTO-CONFIGURATION MECHANISMS FOR MOBILE AD-HOC NETWORKS (MANETS)

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are infrastructure-less networks. Moreover, due to inherent characteristic of mobility of nodes, network merging and partitioning, issues and problems of MANETs are peculiar in nature. Current networking software stacks and services are based on TCP/IP model which is IP address centric. All nodes which want to communicate must have unique IP addresses. Auto-configuration refers to assignment of unique IP addresses to the nodes of MANETs. Due to characteristics of MANETs, assignment of IP addresses to nodes is a non-trivial problem and renders itself as an open issue and potential problem for research. A large number of mechanisms have been proposed for configuring MANET nodes. This paper presents a survey of latest and primitive auto-configuration mechanisms for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs).