A Performance Evaluation of RSerPool Server Selection Policies in Varying Heterogeneous Capacity Scenarios

Reliable server pooling (RSerPool) is a protocol framework for server redundancy and session failover, currently still under standardization by the IETF RSerPool WG. Server redundancy influences load distribution and load balancing, which both are important for the performance of RSerPool systems. Especially, a good load balancing strategy is crucial if the servers of a pool are heterogeneous. Some research on this subject has already been performed, but a detailed analysis on the question of how to make best use of additional capacity in dynamic pools is still open. Therefore, the aim of this paper is, after an outline of the RSerPool framework, to simulatively examine the performance of RSerPool server selection strategies in scenarios of pools with varying server heterogeneity. In particular, this paper examines and evaluates a simple but very effective new policy, achieving a significant performance improvement in such situations.