Multihoming Load Balancer
Fanglu Guo, Jiawu
Chen, Wei Li
The growing popularity of consumer broadband connection technology, in particular Cable Modem and xDSL, has started a quiet revolution that will reshape the Internet connectivity solutions for enterprises. One emerging theme is the replacement of dedicated T1/T3 lines with multiple inexpensive xDSL/Cable Modem links each of which potentially is subscribed from a different ISP. This project develops a multihoming load balancer, which spreads an enterprise's Internet traffic among multiple access links to increase the aggregate throughput, and diverts traffic away from non-functional links when they fail.
This project exploits the design space of multihoming load balancing systems which involves:
l Link availability status checking
l QoS guarantee in the case of multihoming
l Node fault tolerance
l Comparison between hash-based and load-based link selection
l Comparison between connection-granularity and packet-granularity traffic balancing
There are some interesting findings in this project:
l Although hash-based link selection algorithm is stateless, its effectiveness is comparable to load-based link selection algorithm.
l Performance difference between connection-granularity and packet-granularity load balancing algorithms is relatively modest, suggesting NAT-based load balancing schemes are quite adequate in practice.
We have implemented this load balancer in the ISMD product of Rether Network Inc.
l Fanglu Guo, Jiawu Chen, Wei Li, and Tzi-cker Chiueh, ``Experiences in Building a Multihoming Load Balancing System,'' in Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2004, March 2004
l Commercial load balancing products
n NAT-based
u Rether Networks Inc. http://www.rether.com/
u Radware http://www.radware.com/
u F5 Networks http://www.f5.com/
u Nortel Networks http://www.nortelnetworks.com/
u FatPipe http://www.fatpipeinc.com/
n BGP-based
u Cisco, ``How Does Load Balancing Work?'' http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/105/46.html
u RouteScience http://www.routescience.com
u netVmg http://www.netvmg.com/
l Academia
n Zhiruo Cao, Zheng Wang, and Ellen Zegura, ``Performance of Hashing-Based Schemes for Internet Load Balancing'' Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM '00
n Srikant Sharma, Jiawu, Chen, Wei Li, Kartik Gopalan, and Tzi-cker Chiueh, ``Duplex: A Reusable Fault Tolerance Extension Framework for Network Access Devices'' Proc. of 2003 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2003), June 2003
n
A Akella,
J Pang, B Maggs,
n DK Goldenberg, L Qiu, H Xie, YR Yang, Y Zhang, Optimizing cost and performance for multihoming, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2004
n A Akella, S Seshan, A Shaikh, Multihoming Performance Benefits: An Experimental Evaluation of Practical Enterprise Strategies, Proc. of the USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference, 2004
n H Wang, H Xie, L Qiu, A Silberschatz, YR Yang, Optimal ISP Subscription for Internet Multihoming: Algorithm Design and Implication Analysis