Swarm intelligence-based anycast routing protocol in ubiquitous networks

As digital devices with communication capability become more pervasive, we are entering the era of ubiquitous computing, as predicted by Mark Weiser. In ubiquitous environments, distributed context management servers are deployed everywhere to provide information and computing resources for users anytime and anywhere. Smart handheld computing devices with context-aware applications may retrieve context information from the nearest server. This study investigates the problem of routing packets to the nearest server in a ubiquitous environment. An anycast routing protocol based on swarm intelligence, referred to as ARPSI, is proposed to route packets dynamically to a nearby server in a mobile, ad hoc, wireless network. Based on swarm intelligence, ARPSI is able to find a short path to a neighboring server efficiently and quickly. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of ARPSI and our simulation results show that ARPSI achieves a higher packet delivery ratio, shorter routing path to anycast servers, and lower control packet overhead than the AODV-based anycast protocol (A-AODV) protocol.