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

Yoann Desmouceaux (1) , Pierre Pfister , Jerome Tollet , Mark Townsley , Thomas Heide Clausen (1)

1 X - École polytechnique

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.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

Yoann Desmouceaux, Pierre Pfister, Jerome Tollet, Mark Townsley, Thomas Heide Clausen. SRLB: The Power of Choices in Load Balancing with Segment Routing. 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Jun 2017, Atlanta, United States. pp.2011-2016, ⟨10.1109/ICDCS.2017.180⟩. ⟨hal-02263384⟩