An Enhanced Anycast Routing Protocol: Nearest PIM-SM Extension with Loadbalancing Schemes

Abstract

The primary issue with anycast routing protocol is the tradeoff between performance and reliability. An anycast routing protocol that can provide shorter end-to-end delay does not always has lower packet loss, and vice versa. This paper focuses on achieving short end-to-end delay and low packet loss, and proposes an enhancement to the anycast routing protocol called the nearest Protocol Independent Multicast – Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) extension. This extension supports two load-balancing schemes, i.e. shortest-path and round-robin. The UMJaNetSim network simulator is used as the simulation environment for evaluating the nearest PIM-SM extension. Other necessary protocols such as Internet Control Message Protocol Version 6 (ICMPv6) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) are implemented as well. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanisms for anycast routing improve the performance by reducing end-to-end delay and packet loss ratio.