Routing to Multi-Instantiated Destinations: Principles, Practice, and Applications

Prior solutions for routing to multi-instantiated destinations simply adapt existing routing algorithms designed for single-instance destinations, or rely on flooding techniques. In this paper, a new approach for routing to multi-instantiated destinations is introduced, and the Multiple Instance Destination Routing (MIDR) framework is presented as an example of the approach. MIDR uses only distance information to multi-instantiated destinations, without routers having to establish overlays, know the network topology, use complete paths to destination instances, or know about all the instances of destinations. MIDR can be used in name-based content routing, IP unicast routing, multicasting, and anycasting; even in scenarios where the network topology is highly dynamic such as in the case of MANETs. It is shown that MIDR provides multiple loop-free paths to destination instances. Extensive simulation-based experiments performed in the context of MANETs show that MIDR outperforms traditional approaches based on unicast protocols and that it scales to large networks.