Design and Implementation of Anycast Protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In mobile ad-hoc networks, anycast techniques can be used to find the nearest service through the anycast address. Although some anycast schemes have been designed and developed for mobile ad-hoc networks, few of them have been practically implemented on real mobile ad-hoc networks, especially for IPv6 based mobile ad-hoc networks. This work designs and implements an anycast scheme which consists of two parts, an anycast address mapper and a clustering scheme. The anycast address mapper is used to resolve the anycast address. The clustering scheme is used to manage the overhead of the anycast requests. In order to make the clustering scheme be able to support IPv6, the message formats and schemes must be modified to support the features of the IPv6. Experiments are conducted and experimental results demonstrate that our anycast schemes can resolve the anycast address via the anycast address mapper and our schemes can effectively operate on IPv6 mobile ad-hoc networks