An inter-domain load balancing mechanism and performance evaluation

Load balancing technique may improve the performance and scalability of the Internet greatly. Many researchers focus on intra-domain load balancing which distributes traffic over multiple paths or server farms in a single domain. However, there is little research on interdomain (such as inter-AS or inter-PoP) load balancing due to the loose relationship and complex policies among domains. It is important to study inter-domain load balancing under the trend toward a denser mesh of inter-domain connectivity within the Internet. In this paper, we propose a distributed and dynamic load balancing mechanism using a hashing-based algorithm to distribute traffic between domains which preserves per-flow packet ordering and supports unequal weighted distribution when dynamic adaptation is used. We also evaluate the performance of the mechanism.