A Dynamic Load Balancing Scheme based on Host Load Information in a Wireless Internet Proxy Server Cluster

A server load balancer is used to accept and distribute client requests to one of servers in a wireless internet proxy server cluster. LVS(Linux Virtual Server), a software based server load balancer, can support several load balancing algorithms where client requests are distributed to servers in a round robin way, in a hashing-based way or in a way to assign first to the server with the least number of its concurrent connections to LVS. An improved load balancing algorithm to consider server performance was proposed where they check upper and lower limits of concurrent connection numbers to be allowed within each maximum server performance in advance and apply the static limits to load balancing. However, they do not apply run-time server load information dynamically to load balancing. In this paper, we propose a dynamic load balancing scheme where the load balancer keeps each server CPU load information at run time and assigns a new client request first to the server with the lowest load. Using a cluster consisting of 16 PCs, we performed experiments with static content(image and HTML). Compared to the existing schemes, experimental results show performance improvement in the cases of client requests requiring CPU-intensive processing and a cluster consisting of servers with difference performance.