Hybrid load balancing method with failover capability in server cluster using SDN

Abstract: Traditional load balancers used in server clusters have problems such as lack of flexibility, high cost, etc. To overcome these problems, research has been conducted to apply a load balancer using software-defined network (SDN) to the server cluster. Under this trend, in this paper, we proposed a hybrid load balancing method with failover capability in the server cluster using SDN. The main goal of this paper is to improve the performance and failover capability of load balancing. First, we improved the performance of the dynamic weighted random selection (DWRS) algorithm by adopting the binary search to find the target server. Next, we proposed a dynamic method with failover capability by combining the improved DWRS algorithm with a fast-failover (FF) group table. In addition, a hybrid method combining the static method using the SELECT group table and the dynamic method with failover capability is proposed to improve the performance. Finally, the failover capability and performance of the proposed method are evaluated in an experimental environment.