A fast connectiontime redirection mechanism for internet application scalability

Abstract. Applications that are distributed, fault tolerant, or perform dynamic load balancing rely on redirection techniques, such as network address translation (NAT), DNS request routing, or middleware to han dle Internet scale loads. In this paper, we describe a new connection redirection mechanism that allows applications to change end-points of communication channels. The mechanism supports redirections across LANs and WANs and is application-independent. Further, it does not introduce any central bottlenecks. We have implemented the redirection mechanism using a novel end-point control session layer. The perfor mance results show that the overhead of the mechanism is minimal. Fur ther, Internet applications built using this mechanism scale better than those built using HTTP redirection.