Intelligent Message Scheduling in Application Oriented Networking Systems

Cisco Systems application oriented networking (AON) product is an important network element towards building next generation service oriented intelligent information network (IIN). AON processes application-level content and moves far beyond a conventional content-aware Web switch. It creates a novel content delivery platform and allows more sophisticated load balancing schemes to be deployed in a switch among back-end servers to reduce user-perceived response time. In this paper, we investigate different scheduling techniques for an AON system to maximize overall throughput and minimize latency per message for a heterogeneous server cluster consisting of different application servers. Based on a thorough evaluation of the three existing load balancing algorithms of AON, we propose a novel message type based service adaptive scheduling algorithm that makes AON more efficient and more intelligent. Systematic performance measurements, analyses, and comparisons are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our intelligent message scheduling technique.