MAAC Protocol: Mobile Agents based Address Auto-Configuration Protocol for MANET

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are multihop wireless networks of mobile nodes without any fixed or preexisting infrastructure. In contrast to infrastructure-based networks, MANET's topology change randomly due to the unpredictable mobility of nodes and their propagation characteristics and, thus, should be capable of self-organization and -configuration. Therefore, a protocol is needed to perform the network configuration automatically and in a dynamic way, which will use most nodes in the network as if they were servers that manage IP addresses. This paper presents a new mechanism of autoconfiguration in MANET based on mobile multi-agent systems. Our solution allows to make a virtual distributed server which is organized in clusters managed by mobile multi-agent systems that are required to configure the nodes.