AUTOMATIC CONFIGURATION OF AN ADDRESS ALLOCATION MECHANISM IN A COMPUTER NETWORK

摘要

The invention provides a method, computer program and system for automatic and dynamic configuration of an address allocation mechanism in a computer network. The invention provides for allocating network addresses to the devices in the computer network by obtaining routing protocol messages (301), the routing protocol messages being exchanged in the computer network for routing purposes. Then the invention obtains network prefix addresses that correspond to sub-networks (501), the network prefix addresses being obtained using the routing protocol messages. Thereafter, the invention determines a range of valid network addresses for the devices using the network prefix addresses (503).The current invention provides a method and system for automatic configuration of an address allocation mechanism. The method uses routing protocol messages in order to configure the address allocation mechanism with a range of valid IPv4 addresses. Routing protocol messages include information about network prefix addresses corresponding to the sub-network to which the routing protocol message belongs. The current invention extracts the network prefix addresses, and then uses it to determine range of valid IPv4 addresses for the hosts. These valid IPv4 network addresses can then be allocated to the hosts requiring IPv4 network addresses. The current invention also continuously monitors the routing protocol messages to dynamically adapt the address allocation mechanism with changes in the addressing configuration of the computer network.