Supporting quality of service in Web switches

As the Web becomes an important business service delivery infrastructure, the demands for providing service differentiation or QoS support on the Web system have become more strident recently. A Web switch (or server load balancer in the industry parlance) is needed in a server cluster to route the incoming request to the server best suited to respond. Because of the key role the Web switch plays in determining the responsiveness of Web services in a server cluster, it is critical to consider how they can support the quality of service for Web-based applications. This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of an efficient approach to address this issue.