Abstract
Leader election and initialization are two fundamental problems in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The leader can serve as a coordinator in the MANETs and the initialization protocol can assign each host a unique and short id. As we know that none of the research on initialization for IEEE 802.11-based MANETs has been done. Here, we proposed two contention-based leader election and initialization protocols for IEEE 802.11-based single-hop MANETs. Simulation results show that our protocols are efficient.