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.

Publications

• U. Herberg, T. Clausen, "Yet Another Autoconf Proposal (YAAP) for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks", Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (MSN), December 2010
• E. Baccelli, T. Clausen, U. Herberg. C. Perkins, "IP Links in Multihop Ad Hoc Wireless Networks?", Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM), September 2009

Research Reports

• T. Clausen, U. Herberg, Yet Another Autoconf Proposal (YAAP) for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks, INRIA research report 7341, July 2010
• T. Clausen, U. Herberg, AUTOCONF - Stating the Problem, INRIA research report 6376, December 2007