Review: Prophet address allocation for large scale MANETs

The Prophet address allocation scheme uses an arithmetic function F based on an IP address and a state value of F. This function seems to generate a sequence of numbers with a low probability of redundancy. The minimal interval between two occurrences is very large and depends on the IP address range.
Every host holds F and can assign a unique IP to other nodes.
When joining a network, a node A requests a unique IP address. If his request was ignored then A can start configuring a MANET. It proceeds by choosing a random private IP address and a random state value. When a new node B joins the network, A allocates a free IP address to B using F. Then A transmit to B, its new IP address and its state of F. A updates its state of F.
B is now capable to assign free IP addresses to new nodes.
As for partitioning and merging, since the IP addresses are "unique" no changing is required.
When dealing with scenario#3, a host configuring a MANET chooses a Network ID and sends it to new nodes with the free IP address.
When merging two alternative mechanisms have been proposed one of the MANET group should drop its IP addresses and request new free addresses. This method will break on-going communication and routing in the changing MANET.
The second mechanism requires only nodes with conflicting addresses to obtain new addresses. This mechanism requires high overheads to detect conflict addresses and does not provide an answer regarding what function to use for future allocations.
Node A chooses the seed for the whole network and the sequences may be computed locally which means it knows in advance which addresses are going to be allocated.

This scheme is able to reduce communication overheads in scenarios #1 and #2 since every node is able to generate a unique IP address with a low probability of conflict. However the low probability is based on a large range of IP address which is not the case with the private addresses. As for the Scenario #3, it will be handled in their future work.
Their approach is not suitable for large scale MANETs where the probability of assigning the same IP address is high.

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