An Extension Of Scalable Global Ip Anycasting For Load Balancing In The Internet

IP anycasting was considered to be non-scalable, until Katabi et al [5] proposed a scheme called CIA. This scheme makes two important assumptions. One, the anycast addresses have a specific format distinguisable from unicast address. Two, it is only necessary to reach the nearest anycast member only if there is a lot of traffic to the anycast group.In this paper, we propose an extension of CIA to achieve load balancing in the Internet. Our scheme builds upon CIA by adding load information exchange features. This enables the client to choose a member of the anycast group which is not just routing-wise nearest to it, but the one which actually improves its response time, by a proper balance of routing proximity and load. An advantage of our scheme is that it does on-demand routing information exchange, resulting in less overhead. We evaluate the performance of our design through simulation, and show that it achieves better load balancing, compared to CIA, which sends packets to the nearest server, irrespective of the load.