Implementing the reliable server pooling framework

Abstract

The Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) pro- tocol suite currently under standardization by the IETF is designed to build systems providing highly available services by mechanisms and protocols for establishing, configuring, accessing and monitoring pools of server resources. But RSerPool is not only able to manage pools of redundant servers and facilitate service failover between servers: it also includes sophisticated mechanisms for server selections within the pools. These mechanisms make RSerPool useful for applications in load balancing and distributed computing scenarios. As part of our RSerPool research and to verify results of our simulation model in real-life scenarios, we have created a complete implementation prototype of the RSer- Pool framework. In this paper, we will give a detailed description of the concepts, ideas and realizations of our prototype. Furthermore, we will show performance issues raised by the management of large servers pools, as it is necessary for load balancing or distributed computing scenarios. We will explain the algorithms and data structures we designed to solve these challenges and finally present a rough performance evaluation that verifies our concept. Keywords: Internet applications, IPv6 deployment and applications, SS7, server pools