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IPv6 Anycast
One of the more surprising features of IPv6 was the inclusion of an entirely
new communication model, anycast, to join the existing unicast and mul-
ticast models. Where unicast communication permits the transmission of
packets to one specific node, and multicast permits transmission of the
same packet to one or more nodes, anycast adds the ability to send a packet
to any one—and only one—of a group of one or more destination nodes.
Although first specified in the IPv6 specification in 1995 (RFC 1884, “IP
Version 6 Addressing Architecture”), the anycast concept had been around
before then. However, despite the longevity of the idea, as