Insensitive Load Balancing

International audienceA large variety of communication systems, including telephone and data networks, can be represented by so-called Whittle networks. The stationary distribution of these networks is insensitive, depending on the service requirements at each node through their mean only. These models are of considerable practical interest as derived engineering rules are robust to the evolution of traffic characteristics. In this paper we relax the usual assumption of static routing and address the issue of dynamic load balancing. Specifically, we identify the class of load balancing policies which preserve insensitivity and characterize optimal strategies in some specific cases. Analytical results are illustrated numerically on a number of toy network examples

Combined Use of Prioritized AIMD and Flow-Based Traffic Splitting for Robust TCP Load Balancing

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