An Efficient Geographical Addressing Scheme for the Internet

Abstract : Geocast is a scheme which allows packets to be sent to a destination area instead of an address. This allows the addressing of any device in a specific region without further knowledge. In this paper we present an addressing mechanism that allows efficient referral to areas of arbitrary size. The binary representation of our addressing mechanism fits in an IPv6 address and can be used for route lookup with simple exclusive-or operations. We show that our addressing mechanism can be used to address areas accurately enough to be used as a mechanism to route packets close to their destination.