Interval Weighted Load Balancing Method for Multiple Application Gateway Firewalls

摘要

Firewalls are installed at network perimeters to secure organization's network as alternatives to general gateways. Because of potential performance problems on the gateways, load balancing technique has been applied. However, compared to general gateways, firewalls require more intelligent load balancing method to process massive network traffic because of their relatively complex operations. In this paper, we analyze the inherent problems of existing simple load balancing methods for firewalls and propose the interval weighted load balancing (IWLB) to enhance the processing of massive network traffics. The IWLB deals with network traffics in consideration of the characteristics of application protocols to achieve more effective load balancing. We observed that the IWLB outperforms other simple load balancing methods during our simulation. Therefore, we expect that the IWLB is suitable to balancing loads for multiple firewalls at a network perimeter.