A Round Robin Load Balancing and Redundancy Protocol for Network Routers

Businesses rely on information networking to an extent that makes availability of network systems a major requirement and concern. We introduce in this paper a Round Robin Load Balancing and Redundancy Protocol (R²LBRP) for network routers. R²LBRP is inspired from Token Bus, an IEEE standard which provides a medium access protocol for local area networks. R²LBRP uses the same concept of a virtual router as VRRP, but manages the physical routers differently: instead of having only one active router, R²LBRP utilizes all the routers and uses them to forward packets. R²LBRP supports almost-immediate failure discovery, enhanced failover mechanisms, and is able to increase the virtual router bandwidth and to provide finer control over load balancing.