Bandwidth Management using Load Balancing

In order to bridge the speed disparity at the LANWAN interface, enterprises install a number of policy-based devices to enforce administrative policies over the WAN access. The conventional techniques of bandwidth management concentrate only on the outgoing traffic from the local network. Regulating the outgoing traffic is easy given that the user has full control over it. However, controlling the incoming traffic is difficult since the user has no control on the traffic sent by an Internet agent. This paper proposes a simple load balancing approach to optimize the use of WAN links in a multihomed environment. By distributing the user traffic among the various WAN links we try to optimize the utilization of incoming bandwidth on the access links thereby giving an indirect measure to control the incoming traffic. We deploy a prototype implementation of our approach on a campus network with high incoming traffic, to evaluate the performance benefits. Using a large collection of network traces, we find that even with a subnet-level of load balancing there can be significant increase in performance. The proposed load balancing approach can be used as a first step toward controlling the incoming traffic, before other actual bandwidth management techniques are applied.