An Efficient Anycasting Scheme in Ad-hoc Wireless Networks: A Framework for Scalable IP Anycast Protocol

When searching for resources on networks, the system often depends on the broadcast or multicast mechanism to acquire the information, which usually results in large overhead. It will be a serious problem in ad-hoc wireless networks, where the bandwidth is limited and each node moves arbitrarily and acts not only as a host but also as a router. Therefore, it will greatly rely on broadcast or multicast mechanism to search the resources. This work presents an efficient anycasting scheme in ad-hoc wireless networks. The scheme can be used to reduce the request messages, decrease the overhead of response received from duplicate packets, and balance the load of ad-hoc wireless networks. Furthermore, our scheme also supports any K services; it can attain the backup or fault tolerance purpose. Because our scheme is based on the virtual backbone, it is also a scalable protocol for ad-hoc wireless networks.