13Load Balancing in Software Defined Mobile Networks
Ijaz Ahmad,1 Suneth Namal Karunarathna,1 Mika Ylianttila,1 Andrei Gurtov2
1Center for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
2Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
13.1 Introduction
Load balancing is a composition of methods to distribute workload among multiple networks or network components such as links, processing units, storage devices, and users to achieve optimality in respect to resource utilization, maximum throughput, and minimum response time. It also helps to avoid overload and provide quality of service (QoS). In a situation where multiple resources are available for a particular functionality, load balancing can be used to maximize network efficiency and increase fairness in network resource usage while keeping a balance between QoS and resource usage.
Network load balancing started in the form of load balancing hardware, which were application neutral and resided outside of the application servers. These network-based appliances could load balance using simple networking techniques. For example, virtual servers were used to forward connections to the real server deploying bidirectional network address translation (NAT) to load balance among multiple servers. A simple load balancing scenario is shown in Figure 13.1, where virtual servers balance the load among multiple real servers to ensure high availability and QoS.
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