Improving Reliability for Multi-home Inbound Traffic: MHLB/I Packet-Level Inter-domain Load-Balancing

Multi-homing is a network configuration that connects a customer network to multiple service providers. It is used to improve fault-tolerance and throughput. One of its problems is the lack of dynamic load-balancing for inbound network traffic to multi-homed networks, which prohibits us from taking advantage of multi-homing to improve reliability for inbound network traffic. This paper proposes a new routing architecture and a protocol, BGP-MHLB/I (BGP-multi-home load balancing/inbound), to realize dynamic load-balancing for inbound traffic to multi-homed networks. In MHLB/I routing, reliability will be improved by a factor of (m times n), where m is the number of multiple BGP paths available between two end customer networks and n stands for the degree of multi-homing. Our analysis found approximately 80 multiple BGP paths available between two customer networks for up to two extra AS-hop paths. This finding suggests that the proposed BGP-MHLB/I routing will be an effective solution for improving reliability in the Internet.