On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 9:35 PM, George Sanders gosand1982@yahoo.com wrote:
Hello,
My question is:
Who provides IP addresses in a truly ad-hoc, truly "peer only" mesh network ?
One option is IPv6 and link local addresses. These are derived from the MAC address, plus duplicate address detection, to ensure the IP address is unique. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4862
Another option is zeroconf, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroconf, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3927.
Another option is statically configure all the boxes with a unique IP address from a well know subnet. It is often worth remembering that a truly ad-hoc, truly "peer only" mesh network is used within some sort of organization. The organization can impose management rules.
Yes, I do agree that many real world ad-hoc networks will be deployed by an organized group and that we can speak of pre-existing arrangements, or rules, but I am exploring the extreme cases where individuals randomly congregate and have nothing but a common toolset, and there are no server "roles" being played.
Thank you for the pointer to zeroconf, as it is right along the lines of what I was thinking about.
Out of curiousity, what does the freifunk network use for assigning IPs ?
In Brussels, PhilV wrote a patch to udhcpd assign 10.x.x.x adresses from the last digits of the MAC address:
http://reseaucitoyen.be/wiki/index.php/PatchesUdhcpd http://bulles.topgame.be/ReseauCitoyen/udhcp.patch