Hui Ung Kwon , Hu Keun Kwak , Kyu Sik Chung

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 199-210, Aug. 2008
10.3745/KIPSTA.2008.15.4.199,   PDF Download:

Abstract

A Clustering based wireless internet proxy server needs a layer-7 load balancer with URL hashing methods to reduce the total storage space for servers. Layer-4 load balancer located in front of server cluster is to distribute client requests to the servers with the same contents at transport layer, such as TCP or UDP, without looking at the content of the request. Layer-7 load balancer located in front of server cluster is to parse client requests in application layer and distribute them to servers based on different types of request contents. Layer 7 load balancer allows servers to have different contents in an exclusive way so that it can minimize the total storage space for servers and improve overall cluster performance. However, its scalability is limited due to the high overhead of parsing requests in application layer as different from layer-4 load balancer. In order to overcome its scalability limitation, in this paper, we propose a distributed layer-7 load balancer by replacing a single layer-7 load balancer in the conventional scheme by a single layer-4 load balancer located in front of server cluster and a set of layer-7 load balancers located at server cluster. In a clustering based wireless internet proxy server, we implemented the conventional scheme by using KTCPVS(Kernel TCP Virtual Server), a linux based layer-7 load balancer. Also, we implemented the proposed scheme by using IPVS(IP Virtual Server), a linux-based layer-4 load balancer, installing KTCPVS in each server, and making them work together. We performed experiments using 16 PCs. Experimental results show scalability and high performance of the proposed scheme, as the number of servers grows, compared to the conventional scheme.

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