Protocol design for anycast communication in IPv6 network

Abstract

Although anycast communication supports service-oriented addresses many of its current definitions in IPv6 are unclear. Furthermore, since there are no protocol standards or even consensus on routing control, inter-segment anycast communications are not yet available. In this paper, we first discuss these problems and solutions. Based on our findings, we present the anycast address resolving protocol (AARP) to establish TCP connections with a specific anycast address and propose a routing protocol for inter-segment anycasts. Our proposed architecture makes anycast addresses more useful without (or at most minimum) modifications/extensions to existing applications and/or upper-layer protocols.