Design and Implementation of IPv6-based Anycast System for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Anycast techniques can be used to find the nearest services through anycast addresses. However, searching for resources on networks often depends on the broadcast mechanism, which usually results in large overhead. It will be a serious problem in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), where the bandwidth is limited and each node moves arbitrarily. In this work, we propose an anycast scheme for MANETs. This scheme can be used to reduce the request messages and decrease the response overhead received from duplicate packets. Furthermore, our scheme can support the discovery of K services and attain the backup or fault tolerance purpose. Our proposed scheme is also implemented on IPv6 enabled Linux system to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The anycast address mapper is used to solve the route vibration problem for connection-oriented services. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed schemes and the feasibility of our IPv6-based anycast system for MANETs.