A Scalable Server Load Balancing Method Using IP Address Stealing
Kunihiko Toumura, Naokazu Nemoto · 2013
To deal with rapid traffic growth, service providers who offer their services through the Internet must make their service system scalable. To achieve scalability, service providers often use a load balancer on the front of their system. However, load balancers tend to be a bottleneck of the system or a single point of failure. To address this problem, we propose a novel load balancing method as a way to help achieve scalable services. To eliminate the bottleneck imposed by conventional load balancers, our method utilizes IP routing. Each server has a large number of IP addresses for providing client service. When load imbalance occurs, a lightly loaded server "steals" IP addresses from a heavily loaded server. A preliminary experiment carried out using a prototype implementation demonstrates that our method is effective and that randomized monitoring topology works better than ring topologies.