Routing to Multi-instantiated Destinations: Principles and Applications

Prior solutions for routing to multi-instantiated destinations (e.g., Internet multicasting and any casting, and routing in information centric networks) simply adapt existing routing algorithms designed for single-instance destinations, or rely on flooding techniques. As a result, they are unnecessarily complex and incur excessive overhead. A new approach for routing to multi-instantiated destinations is introduced, and MIDR (Multiple Instance Destination Routing) is presented as an example of the approach. MIDR uses only distance information to multi-instantiated destinations, without routers having to establish overlays, know the network topology, use complete paths to destination instances, or know about all the instances of destinations. MIDR enables routers to maintain multiple loop free routes to the nearest instances of any given destination, as well as to some or all instances of the same destination. It is shown that MIDR provides multiple loop-free paths to destination instances, and that is orders of magnitude more efficient than traditional approaches based on routing to single instance destinations. MIDR can be used in name-based content routing, IP unicast routing, multicasting, and any casting.