Route-Count Based Anycast Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In anycast routing the packet is routed to anyone of the anycast group members. Anycast allows supporting many services and can significantly improve network performance of ad hoc networks. Unicast protocols have been extended to support anycast routing, however, these protocols consider solely the shortest path routing. The protocols based on a theory of potential fields have been proposed to improve packet delivery ratio in large mesh networks by routing to area with higher density of nodes instead of the shortest path routing. In this paper, we consider the density of nodes through count of routes. We propose simple anycast protocol which utilizes count of routes to the anycast group member as a routing metric and evaluate its performance.