A novel method for achieving load balancing in web clusters based on congestion control and cost reduction

The World Wide Web is fundamental infrastructure for different services. The number of accessing to web sites is significantly increasing. Cluster-based web systems (web-cluster) are a new solution to implement a web server system with high efficiency and availability. In practice, a web cluster consists of several web servers, and a web switch which distributes user's requests among server nodes. Achieving high efficiency from web cluster requires load balancing between web servers. In this paper, we propose a novel dispatching policy, namely Multi-Class Round Robin with Congestion Control and Cost Reduction (MC-RR-CC-CR), for web switches operating at layer 7 of the OSI protocol stack. The results of a real scenario showed that the proposed method can significantly balance the load of web cluster and substantially improve the system efficiency. Particularly when web cluster is heterogeneous and web site content is dynamic.