Hierarchical area-based address autoconfiguration protocol for self-organized networks

Abstract

Node autoconfiguration is one of the main issues in selforganized networks. One class of approaches relies on hierarchical organization of nodes. This kind of structuration aims to deal with scalability issues, especially for wireless networks. But building and maintaining a hierarchy is generally expensive for these resource-limited networks. We propose a low-cost distributed, hierarchical, location-based address autoconfiguration protocol. Each node infers its address from those of its one-hop neighbors and from its relative position to them. In this way we obtain a globally-consistent organization resulting from local interactions only. This reduces the latency and the overhead generated during address configuration. Moreover this scheme is the first step towards the design of a scalable routing protocol taking advantages of the proposed hierarchical addressing.