A tool for checking Anycast Group Configuration (AGC)
Alcatel-Lucent-Sbell
Anycast is applied in many protocols to provide automatically fault recovery (high availability) and scalability, i.e Anycast RP in PIM, Cooperative Home Agent and Cooperative Foreign Agent in Mobile IP. When the Operator's engineer completing configuring an anycast group, they need a tool to check whether each group member can be reached by the anycast address (instead of by each member's unicast address) When the anycast group members are changed, e.g. there are some new members added on, there are some old members deleted from the group, a tool is needed to check whether the changed group/member can be reached by the anycast address as it should be. When an anycast group have been canceled by configuration, there need a tool to check whether the anycast group configuration have been wiped off from all group members. The existing method is to use existent PING command to ping the anycast address. This existing method can only prove whether one member in the anycast group instead of all members of the anycast group identified by the anycast address can be reached by that anycast address. Hence it cannot satisfy above problems. This document provides a solution to prove that each member of a given anycast group can be arrived by that anycast address.