Flow Based Load Balancing: Optimizing Web Servers Resource Utilization

Authors

  • Leonardo Richter Bays Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
  • Daniel Stefani Marcon Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4013/jacr.2011.12.02

Abstract

The expansion of the Internet has caused a growth on the number of users requesting services through the network, as well as the number of servers and the amount of services they offer. In order to minimize this problem, web servers have started to use a distributed architecture implementation, however with only one external interface for receiving requests from users. In this paper, we propose an approach towards flow-oriented load balancing, using the OpenFlow technology. Thus, each data flow is directed to a server, according to the policy being employed. We evaluate three load balancing techniques: random choice, time slice based choice and weighted balancing, each of them with its advantages and disadvantages.Through our measurements, weighted balancing achieved the best results over the other policies. More over, random choice and time slice based choice are capable of distributing the load in an acceptable way among nodes, considering the average load of each server.

Keywords: load balancing, OpenFlow, flow based load balancing.

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Published

2011-12-12

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 2 (2011): Jul-Dec

Section

Articles

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