Dynamic Load Balancing and Network Monitoring in iATA Protocol for Mobile Appliances

The explosive growth of mobility services and excessive demand for large storage today have popularized the use of virtual storage technology in mobile appliances. A lightweight block-level protocol, Internet Advanced Technology Attachment (iATA), has been developed as an alternative solution to transfer storage commands, status and data over TCP/IP network in a relatively cost-effective way. To improve the protocol scalability and data availability, Load Balancing (LB) and Network Monitoring (NM) mechanisms are implemented to collect system resources state and current network status on each associate node. Based on the collected information, a dynamic weight factor is computed at each node and sent to a referral server (rserver) which will assign the most appropriate node with least weight to serve the client. With this approach, clients can be avoided from connecting to a heavily loaded node that may cause delays in subsequent I/O operations. Writes replication is applied on remaining nodes underneath. A client initially connected to node IP A for write operations will have no hindrance to run the relevant read operations at node IP B in new connections. When a node crashed, data remains recoverable from other nodes. We have conducted several benchmark tests and results are evaluated and verified in later section.