Application Layer Anycast

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach to application layer anycasting. The key to anycast is making it possible for clients to efficiently find the `best´ server for a given application in an unknown group of servers. The anycast service makes a wide range of new multimedia applications possible, and will be part of future integrated services networks. We designed a selective anycast protocol, which is aimed at picking the right server based on application specific metrics, such as network delay and server load. This paper considers server-choosing metrics and efficient mechanisms to compute these metrics. We also present simulation results, which show our approach´s merit, and proves that anycast can significantly improve the performance as compared to the traditional methods.