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Load balancing model for multiple Internet access links
Date Issued
2002
Author(s)
Ganesh, RB
Thirumurthy, R
Gonsalves, TA
Abstract
In order to have high availability and increase in capacity, a small ISP or a corporate office typically gets multiple Internet connections from different large ISPs who provide backbone connectivity. Optimum use of these multiple links requires load-balancing protocols. Most existing routing protocol allow only one link to be active, the other being a standby. Explicit routing and simple dispersion of traffic over all links do load balance the outbound traffic but not the inbound traffic. Having a dynamic co-operating model among different ISPs for controlling the flow of inbound traffic is not possible with standard routing protocols. Since the routing in the Internet is per-hop destination based, at any instance of time most of the inbound traffic flow through one link, which results in that link being the bottleneck and in unbalanced utilization of links. We propose a load-balancing model based oil the NAPT (Network Address Port Translation) technique to have control over the inbound traffic over links and load balance traffic on both directions. We use trace-driven simulation to investigate the performance of our NAPT based load-balancing model and a few existing models. In the presence of relatively high traffic, the trace-driven simulation indicates better performance of the proposed model when compared to the other models.