Contemporary Load Balancing Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Review

Load Balancing (LB) mechanism in cloud computing distributes workloads across multiple computing resources such as, Servers and Virtual Machines (VM). The ultimate goal of LB mechanism is to provide the optimum usage of resources in cloud and ensure none of the resource is overburdened even in high network traffic. The significant feature of LB mechanism encompasses uniform workload distribution thereby improving the performance of the system and ensures high availability of servers; thus, guarantees fault tolerance. Moreover, LB scales up or down the resources as and when required based on the spike in the network traffic. The proposed study provides an insight on LB mechanism, its types and the techniques adapted in LB to attain optimum efficiency or to reach the goals of LB mechanism. Further, this study focuses on the LB mechanism that optimizes the resource usage to bring down the operational costs. The load balancers are categorized as static and dynamic. The choice of LB depends upon the parameters like, resource utilization, workload allocation, priority of workloads as some works relies on other workloads, compilation time, execution time, energy consumption and throughput.