HLB: Toward Load-Aware Load Balancing

The purpose of network load balancers is to optimize quality of service to the users of a set of servers- basically, to improve response times and to reducing computing resources- by properly distributing workloads. This paper proposes a distributed, application-agnostic, Hybrid Load Balancer (HLB) that- without explicit monitoring or signaling- infers server occupancies and processing speeds, which allows making optimised workload placement decisions. This approach is evaluated both through simulations and extensive experiments, including synthetic workloads and Wikipedia replays on a real-world testbed. Results show significant performance gains, in terms of both response time and system utilisation, when compared to existing load-balancing algorithms.