Duplicate Address Detection in OLSR Networks

Thomas Heide Clausen (1) , Emmanuel Baccelli (1) , Julien Garnier (1)

1 X - École polytechnique

Commonly, duplicate address detection is performed when configuring network interfaces in order to ensure that unique addresses are assigned to each interface in the network. Such mechanisms commonly operate with the premises that a node "intelligently" selects an address which it supposes to be unique, followed by a duplicate address detection cycle, through which it verifies that no other active interfaces on the same network has been or is in the process of being configured with the same address. Even assuming that such a mechanism is present in a MANET, allowing MANET nodes to initially configure their interfaces with addresses unique within the network, additional complications arise: two or more MANETs may merge to form a single network, and a formerly connected MANET may partition. Thus, unless it is ensured that all MANET interfaces are assigned globally unique addresses, addressing conflicts may at any point-not just during initial network configuration. In this paper, we investigate the task of performing duplicate address detection when otherwise independent OLSR networks merge. We benefit from the information already exchanged by OLSR, and identify a number of mechanisms through which a node may detect a conflict between the address assigned to one of its interfaces, and an address assigned to an interface on another node. The mechanisms proposed are, thus, entirely passive, creating no additional information exchange on the network.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Thomas Heide Clausen, Emmanuel Baccelli, Julien Garnier. Duplicate Address Detection in OLSR Networks. IEEE Conference on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications, 2005, Sep 2005, Aalborg, Denmark. ⟨hal-02263432⟩