A new stateful host auto-configuration protocol for digital battlefield MANETs

MANETs are self-organizing infrastructure-less networks formed on-fly by a group of wireless nodes. The lack of central administration in these networks necessitates host auto-configuration. Recently, several auto-configuration protocols have been proposed for MANETs. However, these protocols are either not robust enough to respond efficiently to the dynamic nature of the MANETs or they are resource greedy. Previously, no detailed attempt has been made to compare the effectiveness of these protocols. This paper presents a stateful robust host auto-configuration protocol and compares the performance of the proposed protocol with the three other key stateful auto-configuration protocols in different scenarios. Network simulation results demonstrated that the proposed protocol is robust in responding to node failures and message losses as is typically the requirement for real-time highly dynamic environments. The network overhead of the proposed protocol is less than the mainstream approaches. Results also show that the proposed protocol has the ability to do concurrent conflict-free IP address allocations without additional network overhead and can recover aborted addresses efficiently. In addition, there is no address management overhead on non-AA nodes. Hence low processing power, low memory and low energy devices can also participate in the MANET.