A METHOD FOR LOAD SHARING ISING IPv6 ANYCAST ADDERSSING

摘要

The present invention mainly focuses on the efficient utilization of the anycasting technique available with IPv6. Although anycasting is already an improvement over its predecessor the multicasting of IPv4 but still there are a limitations in its use. In the present invention, a protocol is designed whereby these limitations are overcome hence enabling the Anycast service provider to install the servers in cost effective way on same network without rejecting or canceling any of the requests due to overloading. In IPv6, an Anycast Address is assigned to more than one interface (typically belonging to different nodes), with the property that a packet sent to an Anycast address is routed to the "nearest" Anycast Member, according to the routing protocols' measure of distance. Hence, the request from the service user always goes to the nearest Anycast Member/Server irrespective of its current load, as per the current routing protocol behavior/architecture. So, this new method provides Load Sharing between the Anycast Members belonging to same Anycast Group. This method also provides extensions to the existing protocols to maintain the Anycast Member List with all Anycast members