A Review on Auto-Configuration Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad-Hoc networks are the wireless network without infrastructure. MANETs are special kind of wireless networks with no centralized control. They consist of mobile platforms which are free to move arbitrarily. The existing Internet topology has a router topology which is static in nature. In Mobile Ad-hoc network, the nodes are mobile and inter-node connectivity may change frequently during normal operation. A protocol is needed to perform the network configuration automatically and dynamically, which will use all nodes in the network or part of as if they were servers that manage addresses. This paper reviews various auto-configuration protocols and autonomous addressing protocols requiring a distributed and self-managed mechanism in order to avoid address collisions in a dynamic network with fading channels, frequent partitions and joining/leaving nodes. These protocols can be used to configure mobile ad-hoc nodes based on a distributed address database that will reduce the control overhead and also can be helped to overcome packet losses and network partitions.