Abstract: A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an instant infrastructure less self-organizing network, in which each node functions as an end host and a wireless relay. This form of wireless network is created by mobile nodes without any existing or fixed infrastructure. The nodes in the MANET need mutually exclusive identities before participating in any form of communication. In particular, each end host in the MANET needs to be uniquely addressed so that the packets can be relayed hop by hop and delivered ultimately to the destination. Existing routing protocols in MANETs have all assumed a priori that mobile nodes are configured with a valid (conflict free) network address. Because of the multi-hop routing, the MAC address at the link layer level cannot serve for this purpose. On the other hand, address configuration in wired networks, such as DHCP, requires the presence of a centralized DHCP server. It does not work well for MANETs due to the mobility of the nodes and the lack of a central authority. There have been several approaches proposed for dynamic addressing scheme. However, mostly all approaches depend on broadcasting for address solicitation and/or duplicate address detection. As a result, several types of security threats in dynamic IP configuration can be observed. Address allocation schemes can be classified into state full schemes or stateless schemes. The state full schemes keep state information in a database that keeps track of which addresses have been assigned to which computers. Stateless schemes let the computers select an address by themselves and perform a procedure, called Duplicate Address Detection (DAD).Thus this paper focuses on the various IP allocation schemes for MANETs with and without DAD.