A future anycast routing scheme for Information-Centric Network

Information-Centric Network (ICN) aims to achieve the shift of communication model from host-centric to information-centric. In ICN, anycast plays an important role and is even regarded as a primary network primitive in some architectures such as DONA and SCAFFOLD. However, network layer anycast based on route-by-name in these architectures may severely worsen the problem of routing scalability as IP anycast does. On the other hand, the widely used application layer anycast based on lookup-by-name in current Internet exists many flaws such as inaccuracy of server selection and weak responsiveness to dynamic network conditions. Accordingly, how to achieve efficient and flexible anycast becomes a research challenge in future internet. In this paper, a novel anycast routing scheme based on ID/LOC separation is proposed. Then, a decentralized server selection algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is further investigated. Experiments show that efficient and flexible anycast can be achieved to combine the advantages of route-by-name anycast and lookup-by-name anycast.