Global IPv6 anycast address lookup with NP

The rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in the invention of the new Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) to support the addressing needs, ignites new services and meet the demands of new requirements to interconnect all network equipments. Anycasting is one of the new service technologies produced by this invention and requires a new addressing scheme, routing protocols, group management protocol and application support. Address look-up, a novel IP packet forwarding problem needs to be tackled for easy and effective anycast service deployment. Various methods have been proposed for IPv6 global unicast address lookup for high-speed networks, but not for anycast address. This paper discusses the analysis, design and implementation of anycast address look-up mechanism in network processor (NP) for gigabit networks which is an integral part of our SLINA (service locating using initial network layer anycast) architecture for global IPv6 anycast service locating. Our simple and effective solution can be easily adopted and integrated for today's network equipment which supports global unicast addresses. We also discuss the methods for integrated global unicast and anycast address lookup.