Abstract:

Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) is a protocol framework for server redundancy and session failover, currently under standardization by the IETF RSerPool WG. While the basic ideas of RSerPool are not new, their combination into a single, unified architecture is. Server pooling becomes increasingly important, because there is a growing amount of availability-critical applications. For a service to survive localized disasters, it is useful to place the servers of a pool at different locations. However, the current version of RSerPool does not incorporate the aspect of component distances in its server selection decisions. In our paper, we present an approach to add distance-awareness to the RSerPool architecture, based on features of the SCTP transport protocol. This approach is examined and evaluated by simulations. But to also show its usefulness in real life, we furthermore validate our proposed extension by measurements in a PlanetLab-based Internet scenario.