Proactive Address Autoconfiguration and Prefix Continuity

Abstract — In ad hoc networks (MANETs), wireless nodes spontaneously collaborate to route packets among a multi-hop and versatile topology. While such networks have originaly been considered as autarkical systems, it becomes clear that there is a growing interest in connecting them to the Internet. In such a hybrid ad hoc network, one or more nodes act as gateways to the outside world. This situation requires the use of a global addressing scheme in order to allow end-to-end communications between MANET nodes and correspondents in the Internet. In this paper, we present and evaluate an IPv6 address autoconfiguration protocol based on the original concept of prefix continuity. This feature ensures that there exists, between a node N and its gateway G, a path of nodes such that all nodes on this path use the same IPv6 prefix than N and G. As a result, all the nodes of a given sub-network form a logical tree rooted at the sub-network’s gateway, and in which all nodes share an identical IPv6 prefix. In a multiple-gateways and multiple-prefixes environment, our protocol proactively and dynamically reacts to topological changes in order to maintain the prefix continuity of each sub-network. I