Section: Dissemination

MANET Autoconfiguration

One of the assumptions, often brought forward when discussing MANETs is, that they're self-organizing and that a pre-determined infrastructure can not be assumed present to ensure correct operation.

For this to hold true, routers in a MANET must be able to self-configure with their necessary interface parameters – notably, they must be able to acquire suitable and unique prefixes for assigning addresses to hosts, associated to a MANET router. In the dynamic environment of a MANET, this presents a quite unique challenge.

The IETF AUTOCONF working group, chartered in the fall of 2005 with the task of developing MANET autoconfiguration protocols for IPv6. The working group is co-chaired by Thomas Clausen (Hipercom @LIX).