Combined use of prioritized AIMD and flow-based traffic splitting for robust TCP load balancing

Date
2004
Authors
Alparslan, O.
Akar, N.
Karasan, E.
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Print ISSN
0302-9743
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
Springer
Volume
3266
Issue
Pages
124 - 133
Language
English
Type
Article
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract

In this paper, we propose an AIMD-based TCP load balancing architecture in a backbone network where TCP flows are split between two explicitly routed paths, namely the primary and the secondary paths. We propose that primary paths have strict priority over the secondary paths with respect to packet forwarding and both paths are rate-controlled using ECN marking in the core and AIMD rate adjustment at the ingress nodes. We call this technique "prioritized AIMD". The buffers maintained at the ingress nodes for the two alternative paths help us predict the delay difference between the two paths which forms the basis for deciding on which path to forward a new-coming flow. We provide a simulation study for a large mesh network to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of the average per-flow goodput and byte blocking rates. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Keywords
Load balancing, Multi-path routing, TCP, Traffic engineering
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)