Anycast Routing Based on the Node Degree for Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

The any cast routing protocol is useful in ad hoc and sensor networks as well as in the Internet. This study proposes an any cast routing protocol for ad hoc and sensor networks. The proposed method is lightweight and works with local information, which is obtainable at each node through advertisement packets transmitted from neighbor nodes. These characteristics are well suited to ad hoc and sensor networks. For these networks, reliability is important because their topologies frequently change owing to unreliable links and node mobility. The main feature of the proposed method is to utilize the metric computed from the node degree, i.e., the number of adjacent nodes and the hop distance. With this metric, the proposed method achieves highly reliable routing by determining the next hop for a packet. This next hop selected forwards the packet in the direction in which a larger number of alternate routes are available. The proposed method was tested by a computer simulation and compared with existing methods. The simulation uses two network models. One assumes unreliable links, while the other assumes node mobility. The result shows that the proposed method achieves higher reliability for these models than the existing any cast protocols.