Geographic Load Balancing for Scalable Distributed Web Systems

Users of highly popular Web sites may experience long delays when accessing information. Upgrading content site infrastructure from a single node to a locally distributed Web cluster composed by multiple server nodes provides a limited relief, because the cluster wide-area connectivity may become the bottleneck. A better solution is to distribute Web clusters over the Internet by placing content nodes in strategic locations. A geographically distributed architecture where the Domain Name System (DNS) servers evaluate network proximity and users are served from the closest cluster reduces network impact on response time. On the other hand, serving closest requests only may cause unbalanced servers and may increase system impact on response time. To achieve a scalable Web system, we propose to integrate DNS proximity scheduling with an HTTP request redirection mechanism that any Web server can activate. We demonstrate through simulation experiments that this further dispatching mechanis...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: MASCOTS
• Authors: Valeria Cardellini, Michele Colajanni, Philip S. Yu
• Keywords: HTTP Request Redirection, MASCOTS 2000, MASCOTS 2007, Response Time, Web Clusters