A mobile device in a MANET must be assigned a free IP address before it may participate in unicast communication. This is a fundamental and difficult problem in the practical use of any MANET. Several solutions have been proposed. However, these approaches have different drawbacks. A new IP address allocation algorithm, namely prophet allocation, is proposed in the paper. The proposed scheme may be applied to large scale MANETs with low complexity, low communication overhead, even address distribution, and low latency. Both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over other known algorithms. Moreover, the proposed prophet allocation is able to solve the problem of network partition and merger efficiently.