SRLB: The Power of Choices in Load Balancing with Segment Routing

  • Yoann Desmouceaux
  • , Pierre Pfister
  • , Jerome Tollet
  • , Mark Townsley
  • , Thomas Clausen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Network load-balancers generally either do not take application state into account, or do so at the cost of a centralized monitoring system. This paper introduces a load-balancer running exclusively within the IP forwarding plane, i.e. in an application protocol agnostic fashion-yet which still provides application-awareness and makes real-time, decentralized decisions. To that end, IPv6 Segment Routing is used to direct data packets from a new flow through a chain of candidate servers, until one decides to accept the connection, based on its local state. This way, applications themselves naturally decide on how to share incoming connections, while incurring minimal network overhead, and no out-of-band signaling. Tests on different workloads-including realistic workloads such as replaying actual Wikipedia access traffic towards a set of replica Wikipedia instances-show significant performance benefits, in terms of shorter response times, when compared to a traditional random load-balancer.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017
EditorsKisung Lee, Ling Liu
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages2011-2016
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781538617915
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Jul 2017
Event37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: 5 Jun 20178 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

Conference

Conference37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period5/06/178/06/17

Keywords

  • Application-aware
  • Load-balancing
  • Segment routing

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