Load Balancing on the Internet

Abstract

This chapter gives a survey of state‐of‐the‐art load‐balancing strategies on the Internet. Internet services must be scalable, available, and responsive to handle large traffic volumes and support up to millions of concurrent clients. This scalability requirement goes beyond the capability of any single machine servers. Cluster server architecture is gaining momentum in support of scalable Internet services. The servers in a cluster can be either distributed locally at the same site or globally distributed in different geographical locations. Load balancing is a key integration technology at both layers for performance. This chapter presents a characterization of Web services and gives a classification of load balancing strategies according to their deployment locations (server, network, and client sides), information taken into account (state‐blind, client‐state aware, and server‐state aware), and implementation levels (network and application layers). Representative load balancing strategies in each category are reviewed.