It is important to analyze link status changes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) since the wireless channel is affected by multiple sources of interference. Scalability is a major research topic in the development of MANET routing algorithms, since the network resource of MANET is limited due to the contention-based wireless communication channel. This paper proposes to adopt a dominant pruning (DP) algorithm, instead of using the conventional blind flooding in AAPs, to reduce the broadcasting redundancy in MANET address auto-configuration protocol (AAP) in the status of link change. A novel method to enable AAP to attain routing capability, by suggesting new messages, is proposed. Simulation demonstrates that the performance improves when the conventional AAPs such as Strong DAD, Weak duplicate address detection (DAD) with proactive routing protocols (WDP), Weak DAD with on demand routing protocols (WDO) and MANET conf are replaced with the proposed algorithms.

This paper proposes a novel method to perform a quantitative analysis of message complexity and applies this method in comparing the message complexity among the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) address autoconfiguration protocols (AAPs). The original publications on the AAPs had incomplete parts, making them insufficient to use on practical MANETs. Therefore, the first objective of the research was to complete the AAPs by filling in the missing gaps to make them operational. The missing procedures that were filled in have been developed based on the most logical procedures being accurate to the original protocol publications. The research in this paper finds applications in wireless networks that apply reduced addresses to achieve less memory usage, smaller overhead, and higher throughput (for example, the IPv6 low-power wireless personal address network (6LoWPAN)), but, as a result, possess a high address duplication probability. This research consists of two cases, where the first case deals with the message complexity analysis of the single-node joining case (SJC) and the second case deals with the complexity analysis of the MANET group merging case (GMC).

Since network resource of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is limited due to the contention-based wireless communication channel at the medium access layer and energy of mobile nodes is constrained due to the energy-limited batteries, the scalability issue is one of main research topics in developing MANET routing algorithms. Therefore, this paper analyzes the message complexities of group shared tree (GST) and source- specific tree (SST) that are implemented in most MANET multicast routing algorithms. Simulation demonstrates that in a wireless ad hoc network where SST and GST are well maintained during the simulation, SST algorithm is able to achieve very competitive performance (i.e. less message complexity) under the multiple packet transmissions, in comparison with GST where no core selection algorithm is adopted.