  A Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) consists of nodes which use multi-hop
communication to establish connection between nodes. Traditional infrastructure
based systems use a centralized architecture for address allocation. However,
this is not possible in Ad hoc networks due to their dynamic structure. Many
schemes have been proposed to solve this problem, but most of them use
network-wide broadcasts to ensure the availability of a new address. This
becomes extremely difficult as network size grows. In this paper, we propose an
address allocation algorithm which avoids network-wide broadcasts to allocate
address to a new node. Moreover, the algorithm allocates addresses dynamically
such that the network maintains an "IP resembles topology" state. In such a
state, routing becomes easier and the overall overhead in communication is
reduced. This algorithm is particularly useful for routing protocols which use
topology information to route messages in the network. Our solution is designed
with scalability in mind such that the cost of address assignment to a new node
is independent of the number of nodes in the network.
