An efficient solution to a retrial queue for the performability evaluation of DHCP

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is designed to provide an automatic mechanism for the allocation, configuration and management of IP addresses and TCP/IP protocol stack parameters of computers and devices in IP networks. The important feature of DHCP is a “dynamic allocation” mechanism, which assigns an IP address to a client for a limited period of time (called a lease time). Therefore, a previously allocated IP address can automatically be assigned to another host by a DHCP server upon the expiration of the lease time if a host does not renew the use of an allocated IP address. This paper proposes a retrial queueing model to approximate the performability of the DHCP dynamic allocation mechanism. An efficient computational algorithm is developed to calculate the steady state probabilities of a continuous time discrete state Markov process. A comparison of our approximate model with a detailed simulation model of the DHCP dynamic allocation mechanism shows an excellent agreement between the analytical and simulation results. The impact of the lease time parameter on the performability of the DHCP dynamic allocation mechanism is also illustrated through a numerical study.