IDSDDIP: a secure distributed dynamic IP configuration scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

SUMMARY In IP-based networks, IP address uniqueness is one of the most important requirements since a node has to participate in unicast communications and routing. Often nodes are assumed to have unique IP addresses configured a priori. However, this is not the case and cannot be achieved easily in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Most of the existing dynamic address allocation schemes of MANET rely on network-wide flooding for address solicitation and/or duplicate address detection. As a result, several types of security threats can be seen at the time of address allocation. In this paper, we present an ID-based distributed dynamic IP configuration scheme that securely allocates IP addresses to the authorized nodes without flooding the entire network. Here each node acquires capability of generating unique IP addresses from its own IP address and can assign those addresses to the new nodes. The proposed scheme provides security against the associated threats with dynamic IP allocation protocol without the help of a trusted third party. It also efficiently handles the network partitioning and merging and reduces the chance of address conflicts. Performance analysis and simulation results are present to show that the proposed addressing scheme has low communication overhead and fairly low addressing latency with added security mechanisms compared to the similar existing dynamic address allocation schemes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.