A Distributed k-Anycast Routing Protocol Based on Mobile Agents

k-Anycast is a communication paradigm that is proposed to deliver a packet to any threshold k members of a set of communication group hosts. Most k-Anycast routing protocols are centralized and they are not suitable for high dynamic networks (such as wireless sensor networks and wireless ad hoc networks) because they assume that each routing node has global network information. A distributed k-Anycast routing protocol based on mobile agents is proposed in this paper. The protocol forms multiple components and each component has at least k members. Each component can be treated as a virtual server, so k-Anycast service is distributed to each component. In this protocol, mobile agents are applied to initiate or manage components and routing table, so each routing node needn't global network information, only needs to exchange routing information with its neighbors, so the protocol saves much communication cost and adapts to high dynamic networks. Compared to flooding method and centralized k-Anycast routing protocols, performances of the protocol are improved in terms of cost, time delay and scalability.