Anycast Routing for Mobile Services

This paper considers the problem of locating and forwarding network traffic to any one of a set of distributed servers or service points—primarily in the context of mobile ad hoc networks. The advantages of providing such a capability through the use of anycast routing techniques at the network layer are discussed. We then illustrate how several different classes of unicast routing protocols can be extended to provide efficient construction and maintenance of anycast routes. Extensions to link-state, distance-vector and linkreversal unicast routing protocols are all conceptually realized through the representation of an anycast service as a “virtual node” in a graph based on the network topology. The initial results of a simulation study, which demonstrate how anycast routing techniques can provide a one-to-any communication capability with greater efficiency than traditional unicast based techniques, are presented and discussed. The simulation results further indicate that anycast routing can ease the configuration and management required to achieve a given level of robustness and can reduce connection setup latency and message packet delay.