A Load Balancer for a Multi-Stage Router Architecture
Shadi Atalla, Andrea G. Bianco, Robert Birke, Luca Giraudo · International Journal of Computer Applications · 2014
Multi-stage software router architectures permit to overcome several limitations inherent to single stage software routers.One of the key elements of the multi-stage architecture under study are the load balancers, which are used to distribute the load among backend routers.However, using a PC (Personal Computer) as a load balancer could create a performance bottleneck in the overall architecture.Since the operations performed by the load balancer are simple, we explore the possibility of an hardware-based implementation of load balancing functionality with the goal of improving its performance.In this paper, we describe the architecture of an FPGA-based load balancer and we present some performance results of its prototype implementation.