Design and Implementation of an Anycast Services Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Anycasting is a network service that selects the best one of service providers in an anycast group as a destination. While anycasting offers better service flexibility in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), it also incurs new problems. In MANETs, every node can move arbitrarily, and the routes from mobile nodes to their service providers would vary. Therefore, anycast service discovery in MANETs usually relies on network-layer message broadcasting, which leads to large traffic overhead for the scarce bandwidth of MANETs. In this work, we present a traffic-control scheme for anycast service discovery in MANETs. Our scheme can reduce the volume of query messages and the reply messages. In addition to basic anycasting, our scheme also supports k-anycast service that requests for k anycast service providers in each service instance. With k-anycast service, the fault tolerance and service flexibility of our scheme can be improved. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is efficient and feasible for MANETs.