Implementation of a network based cloud load balancer

Abstract

Cloud service providers offer their customers to rent or release hardware resources (CPU, RAM, HDD), which are isolated in virtual machine instances, on demand. Increased load on customer applications or web services require more resources than a physical server can supply, which enforces the cloud provider to implement some load balancing technique in order to scatter the load among several virtual or physical servers. Many load balancers exist, both centralized and distributed, with various techniques. In this paper we present a new solution for a low level load balancer (L3B), working on a network level of OSI model. When a network packet arrives, its header is altered in order to forward to some end-point server. After the server replies, the packet's header is also changed using the previously stored mapping and forwarded to the client. Unfortunately, the results of the experiments showed that this implementation did not provide the expected results, i.e., to achieve linear speedup when more server nodes are added.