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02
Advantages of Anycast
High Availability
The failure of one or more servers can be compensated by anycast.
Load Distribution
Unnoticed by the sender, the load of the requests can be distributed among the different servers by always delivering the packets to the nearest server.
Shorter Access Times
The possible geographical proximity of the respective servers to the sender shortens the access time.
03
Alternative Routing Schemes
In addition to anycast there are other routing schemes that work differently.
Unicast
Unicast is the standard in data transmission where there is exactly one sender and one receiver. Unicast routing occurs, for example, when a user accesses a website hosted on a single server.
For the client there is no difference compared to unicast when using anycast, because the anycast servers can be reached via the same IP address. In most cases they also have a unicast address so that they can be addressed individually for administration purposes.
Multicast
In multicast, an endpoint sends data which is forwarded to the requesting devices via nodes. Multicast is used for IPTV transmissions, among others, to save bandwidth. As a result, not every device has to request the stream individually, but the stream is split and distributed onwards.
Broadcast
In broadcast, a single endpoint sends data to all endpoints in a broadcast domain. Among other things, television stations use this scheme for video and audio distribution.
Geocast
Geocast works in large part like multicast: An endpoint sends data to a variety of devices. However, geocast is limited to a specific geographical region. It is therefore mainly used for regional messages and services. The geographical area is determined by means of geo-routers and GPS data.