Abstract :
This report describes a new concept in gateways called the team-of-gateways. A team-of-gateways is a collection of gateways, each of which forwards traffic between a Local Area Network (LAN) and the ARPANET, but only one of which runs the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) with the core system of gateways. The benefits of the team-of-gateways are increased reliability and throughput without an increased routing burden on the EGP core system. This report describes the team-of-gateways concept, its design and implementation, and results and conclusions based on our testing and use of the team-of-gateways. Results show that the team-of-gateways reliability improvement over a single gateway is excellent, and that the team-of-gateways throughput improvement can be good, depending on the network configuration and the traffic-splitting mechanisms in the hosts and in the ARPANET.
