A Mechanism Based on Netfilter for Live TCP Migration in Cluster

TCP migration is an important and complex aspect of process migration, which is the foundation of dynamic load balancing. Single IP Address cluster offers a transparent view of a cluster of machines as if they were a single computer on the network. In such an environment, TCP migration can play a significant role for providing services seamlessly. In this paper, we propose a live migration mechanism using Net filter framework in which no modification to Linux kernel is required. The proposed plug-in module approach has the following advantages: flexibility-TCP migration functions may be loaded and unloaded dynamically, without node function interruption, TCP connections are kept alive while migration is taking place.