Network Traffic Routing Schemes

The Internet Protocol and other network addressing systems recognize five main addressing methodologies:

• Anycast addressing uses a one-to-nearest association; datagrams are routed to a single member of a group of potential receivers that are all identified by the same destination address.
• Broadcast addressing uses a one-to-many association; datagrams are routed from a single sender to multiple endpoints simultaneously in a single transmission. The network automatically replicates datagrams as needed for all network segments (links) that contain an eligible receiver.
• Multicast addressing uses a one-to-unique many association; datagrams are routed from a single sender to multiple selected endpoints simultaneously in a single transmission.
• Unicast addressing uses a one-to-one association between destination address and network endpoint: each destination address uniquely identifies a single receiver endpoint.
• Geocast refers to the delivery of information to a group of destinations in a network identified by their geographical locations. It is a specialized form of Multicastaddressing used by some routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks.

Routing schemes
anycast
broadcast
multicast
unicast
geocast