SUMMARYRecent trends in information and communications technologies are oriented toward the design of the Future Internet and the Internet of Things. While IPv6‐based mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are emerging as an important building block of these new technologies, it is necessary to come up with adequate self‐configuration capabilities allowing for seamless and automated configuration of addresses in mobile environment. The mechanisms of stateless address autoconfiguration proposed for IPv6 networks are supposed to automate some configuration steps; however, they would need to be aligned with the requirements imposed by MANET networks. Therefore, in this article, we present Neighbor Discovery ++ – an extended IPv6 Neighbor Discovery protocol for enhanced duplicate address detection in MANETs, which provides increased coverage of network nodes, while minimizing protocol overhead. It exploits efficient flooding mechanism on the basis of the multipoint relay concept, which makes it an interesting approach also for large‐scale networks. Trials performed on the designated real‐world testbed platform indicate that ND++ is a promising solution to support efficient address autoconfiguration in MANETs. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.