k-anycast routing schemes for mobile ad hoc networks

Any cast is a communication paradigm that was first introduced to the suit of routing protocols in IPv6 networks. In anycast, a packet is intended to be delivered to one of the nearest group hosts, k-anycast, however, is proposed to deliver a packet to any threshold k members of a set of hosts. In this paper, we propose three k-anycast routing schemes for mobile ad hoc networks. Our research work is motivated by the distributed key management services using threshold cryptography in mobile ad hoc networks in which the certification authority's functionality is distributed to any k servers. However, security is not the main focus of this paper. Our goal is to reduce the routing control messages and network delay to reach any k servers. The first scheme is called controlled flooding. The increase of flooding radius is based on the number of responses instead of increasing radius linearly or exponentially. The second scheme, called component-based scheme I, is to form multiple components such that each component has at least k members. We can treat each component as a virtual server as in anycast, thus, we simplify the k-anycast routing problem into an anycast routing problem. For the highly dynamic network environment, we introduce the third scheme, called component-based scheme II, in which the membership a component maintains is relaxed to be less than k. The performances of the proposed schemes are evaluated through simulations