Secure communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is important as nodes communicate over the wireless medium, which can be easily eavesdropped. Currently, the literature of secure IP address autoconfiguration in MANETs is extremely rare. In this paper, we propose five protocols that provide both secure IP address autoconfiguration and authenticated group key agreement (GKA) to give a more efficient and secure solution for MANET communications. Whenever a dynamic group membership event such as node join, node leave, network merge and network partition occurs, our protocols ensure that the IP address allocation table and group key are updated so that there are no address conflicts and leaving and joining users cannot decrypt future and previous communications respectively. A complexity analysis shows that despite having additional capabilities such as IP address autoconfiguration and key authentication, our protocols are still efficient when compared to other GKA protocols.

An event-driven sensor network composed of a large number of sensor nodes has been widely studied. A sensor node sends packets to a sink when the node detects an event. For the sink to receive packets it fails to acquire, the sink must send re-transmission requests to the sensor node. To send the requests to the sensor node using unicast, the network address of the sensor node is required to distinguish the sensor node from others. Since it is difficult to allocate the address manually to a number of nodes, a reasonable option is to use existing address autoconfiguration methods. However, the methods waste the limited energy of the sensor nodes due to using a number of control messages to allocate a permanent address to every node. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient address autoconfiguration method for the event-driven sensor network. The proposed method allocates a temporary address only to a sensor node which detects an event, on an on-demand basis. By performing simulation studies, we evaluated the proposed method and compared it with one of the existing methods based on the number of control messages for the address allocation. The results show that the number of control messages of the proposed method is small compared to that of the existing method. We also evaluated the process time overhead of the proposed method using the implemented system. Although the proposed method has little extra overhead, the results show the processing time is short enough for practical use.

We propose an efficient IP address assignment protocol in mobile ad hoc networks, which use a proactive routing protocol. In this method, which is termed the Bisected-Range based Assignment (BRA), a node repeatedly broadcasts an Agent Request to ask for address assignment. If there are one or more neighbor MANET nodes, one of them becomes an agent to select and assign an IP address to the requesting node. We use address location in the IP address space so that each agent maintains its own exclusive address range to be used for address selection, resulting to decrease the possibility of address conflict. If the requesting node cannot discover any neighbor MANET node over pre-determined random agent-search time, it selects by itself an IP address at random from the given address block. We evaluate performance of the basic and enhanced BRAs by computer simulation. It is shown that the basic and enhanced BRAs can reduce address conflict compared with random assignment. It is also shown that the enhanced BRA is superior in terms of control traffic overhead as well as address assignment delay over the random assignment with the strong Duplicate Address Detection.