RFC 1546 (rfc1546) - Page 1 of 9
Host Anycasting Service
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group C. Partridge
Request for Comments: 1546 T. Mendez
Category: Informational W. Milliken
BBN
November 1993
Host Anycasting Service
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
This RFC describes an internet anycasting service for IP. The
primary purpose of this memo is to establish the semantics of an
anycasting service within an IP internet. Insofar as is possible,
this memo tries to be agnostic about how the service is actually
provided by the internetwork. This memo describes an experimental
service and does not propose a protocol. This memo is produced by
the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).
Motivation
There are a number of situations in networking where a host,
application, or user wishes to locate a host which supports a
particular service but, if several servers support the service, does
not particularly care which server is used. Anycasting is a
internetwork service which meets this need. A host transmits a
datagram to an anycast address and the internetwork is responsible
for providing best effort delivery of the datagram to at least one,
and preferably only one, of the servers that accept datagrams for the
anycast address.
The motivation for anycasting is that it considerably simplifies the
task of finding an appropriate server. For example, users, instead
of consulting a list of archie servers and choosing the closest
server, could simply type:
telnet archie.net
Partridge, Mendez & Milliken
