Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Delivery Semantics in Routing

Routing schemes differ in their delivery semantics:

  • unicast delivers a message to a single specified node;
  • broadcast delivers a message to all nodes in the network;
  • multicast delivers a message to a group of nodes that have expressed interest in receiving the message;
  • anycast delivers a message to any one out of a group of nodes, typically the one nearest to the source.

Unicast is the dominant form of message delivery on the Internet, and this article focuses on unicast routing algorithms.

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