Routing with anycasting in ad-hoc networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are infrastructureless multi-hop networks in which nodes behave as mobile routers. The intermediate node is often faced with the decision to choose between two of its neighbors, both of which may be equally good for forwarding the packet to the final destination. Selection is then made randomly, without respecting the possibility that one of the nodes may not be suitable for immediate transmission. Anycasting paradigm can be quite useful in such scenario. Roy et al. (2004) propose MAC layer anycasting and claim that it can make educated decisions in such scenarios, leading to potential benefits in performance. However we argue that MAC-layer anycasting can introduce several tradeoffs and can be disadvantageous in certain aspects. To avoid these tradeoffs we propose to enhance MAC layer anycasting with the use of metric based filters in anycasting. Our work is greatly influenced by the research of Zegura et al. (2000). We believe this technique can enhance the performance (with added advantage of some sort Of QoS to be delivered) without much overheads as involved in MAC layer anycasting.