Internet service cluster dispatching via a TCP redirection option

The availability and scalability of mission critical internet services are increasingly provided via the concept of a service cluster. User requests to the DNS advertised IP address of the cluster are load balanced within the cluster. This load balancing is provided via one of four strategies - client side server selection, DNS Round-Robin, server side filtering, and most popularly server side dispatching. Server side dispatching relies upon a dispatching entity to initially receive all service requests from clients, and then direct each request to the most appropriate cluster instance. The existing internet communication protocols (TCP/IPv4) provide no specific functionality to streamline this dispatching within the cluster. The research within this paper proposes the addition of a redirection option into the TCP specification to facilitate more efficient request dispatching. We have evaluated the impact of our research theory via implementation within the TCP and socket layer API of the Linux kernel