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Load Balancing and Load Sharing

Load sharing involves splitting network traffic across multiple routers or paths, not necessarily evenly. It allows higher capacity paths to carry more traffic. Load balancing aims to distribute traffic evenly across paths to maximize efficiency, but perfect load balancing is difficult to achieve due to dynamic network conditions. Both terms refer to techniques for distributing network traffic load across multiple links or devices.

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146 views2 pages

Load Balancing and Load Sharing

Load sharing involves splitting network traffic across multiple routers or paths, not necessarily evenly. It allows higher capacity paths to carry more traffic. Load balancing aims to distribute traffic evenly across paths to maximize efficiency, but perfect load balancing is difficult to achieve due to dynamic network conditions. Both terms refer to techniques for distributing network traffic load across multiple links or devices.

Uploaded by

sampathabo
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Load sharing:

 Load sharing means one can split the traffic from a network to be
transported by different routers (paths).
 That's exactly what Cisco does with MHSRP. The document on
Configuring Multichassis Multilink PPP states that when it tells it to
configure half of the hosts with one default gateway and the second
half with the other.
 Load sharing is inherent to the forwarding process of a router to
share the forwarding of traffic, if the routing table has multiple paths
to a destination.
 If equal paths, the forwarding process will decide the manner of
forwarding and forward packets based on the load-sharing algorithm
used.
 This still bears the possibility of unbalanced forwarding.
 If unequal paths, the traffic is distributed inversely proportionally to
the cost of the routes.
 That is, paths with lower costs (metrics) are assigned more traffic,
and paths with higher costs are assigned less traffic.
 Load sharing is a term used when attempting to share some of the
traffic across multiple links.
 A good example of load sharing is when having two devices connect
using two links of different speed. Let’s say link one is 9Mbit/s, and
the other is 3Mbit/s.
 For every three packets we send through the 9Mbit link, we would
want to send one packet down the 3Mbit/s link.
 The result is that the 9Mbit/s link would send a higher proportion of
traffic than the 3Mbit/s link.

Load Balancing:

 Load balancing is a concept that aims to make a network more


efficient.
 Load balancing distributes of traffic load evenly across a network
with multiple-paths, in order to get optimal resource utilization,
maximize throughput and minimize response time.
 Thus load-balancing will split the traffic down the configured paths
equally towards the destination.
 E.g., with two 768 kpbs links and 800 kpbs traffic at any point,
conceptually with load-balancing each path should have 400 kpbs
worth of traffic.
 Load balancing is an attempt to process traffic evenly across a
network with multiple links.
 The reason this term is less preferred than load sharing is because it
is difficult to achieve perfect load balancing.
 With load balancing, if I looked at two traffic graphs, I’d expect to
see two identical amounts of bandwidth being used on each path to
the destination.
 Because of the different ways I can achieve load balancing it can be
difficult to achieve true load balancing across each of the paths.
 Load balancing means distributing the traffic evenly and
dynamically among different paths to avoid link congestion and
saturation.
 This can be done in a packet-by-packet basis or per destination in a
round-robin fashion.
 The packets sent by a host follow different paths to the same
destination. All paths belong to all hosts.

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