| A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a temporary wireless network composed of mobile nodes without any infrastructure. It has many advantages over a hardwired network or a wireless LAN and can be applied to many scenarios where it is expensive or impossible to build an infrastructure, such as a temporary network in meeting rooms, airports, stadiums, battlefields, search and rescue, and "smart transportation". However, prior to the practical deployment of the MANET, there are some problems to solve, among which are autoconfiguration and security. We proposed Prophet Address Allocation to allocate IP addresses automatically, which is efficient in a large-scale MANET. Improved with security mechanisms, Secure Prophet Address Allocation is able to guarantee the uniqueness of address allocation in presence of many kinds of attacks. With the deployment of autoconfiguration, a mobile node will change its address more frequently, so IP address handoff scheme is proposed to save the communication overhead caused by the address change. With the introduction of autoconfiguration, the assumption under the security framework in the MANET is changed. Thus, a multiple-key cryptography-based distributed certificate authority is proposed to build a security infrastructure in the MANET. Similar to the MANET, a sensor network is an infrastructureless wireless network consisting of a large number of sensor nodes, in which autoconfiguration is an important issue to be solved. We proposed a reactive ID assignment for sensor networks, which is tolerant to packet loss and invulnerable to specific kinds of attacks. The advantages of these schemes are supported by our theoretical analysis, simulation results and prototype implementation. |
