Flow Based Dynamic Load Balancing for Passive Network Monitoring
Uichin Lee, Joon‐Sang Park, M.Y. Sanadidi, Mário Gerla · 2005
Cluster based packet capturing is a way of overcoming the speed of a slow disk to tap a high-speed network. Most cluster-based architectures, however, do not consider load balancing as an important issue. In order to perform mon-itoring at full line speed without losing packets, we accept that the balance among back-end servers must be main-tained. Conventional methods rely on fixed or random rout-ing where a ”source-destination ” address pair is used as a unit for load balancing. Instead of using such a coarse grain unit, we use a flow, a ”source-destination-port ” pair. In ad-dition, we adaptively balance loads of back-end servers us-ing a flow load estimation technique. The proposed meth-ods have been validated by performing a trace-based sim-ulation. Compared to the existing routing approaches, our method balances load of back-end servers. From a simula-tion, we find that for protocols having a transient load with a small variance in flow length, we may use simple meth-ods of load balancing such as round-robin, but for those having a persistent load with a large variance, we need to use a flow estimation technique.