Reliable Server Pooling – A Novel IETF Architecture for Availability-Sensitive Services

Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool) is a light-weight protocol framework for server redundancy and session failover, currently still under standardization by the IETF RSerPool WG. While the basic ideas of RSerPool are not new, their combination into a single, resource-efficient and unified architecture is. Server redundancy directly leads to the issues of load distribution and load balancing, which are both important for the performance of RSerPool systems. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the performance of such systems with respect to the load balancing strategy required by the application. The goal of our paper is - after presenting a short overview of the RSerPool architecture and its application cases - to provide a quantitative, application-independent performance analysis ofRSerPool's server failure handling capabilities with respect to important adaptive and non- adaptive load balancing strategies. We will also analyse the impact of RSerPool protocol parameters on the performance of the server failure handling functionalities and the network overhead.