Evaluating Self-Addressing Protocols for Ad-Hoc Networks

Ad-hoc networks are supposed to operate autonomously and, therefore, self-* technologies are fundamental to their deployment. Many of these so- lutions have been proposed during the last few years, covering several layers and functionalities of network- ing systems. Addressing can be considered as one of the critical operations given the support it provides to other operations such as routing in IP-based net- works. This paper has the goal of analyzing different strategies of addressing in ad-hoc networks. Five self- addressing protocols were evaluated and their strenghts and drawbacks identified. It is not our goal, in this paper, to come up with a new proposal for addressing autonomous networks, but to evaluate existing ones in a non-isolated manner. We considered critical situations of ad-hoc networks, like partition and merging. Conclu- sions about the evaluated protocols are drawn at the end of this paper.