Enabling Content-Based Load Distribution for Scalable Services

We argue that using information content of individual client requests to distribute load across a cluster of workstations or PCs has many attractive properties, and describe how current Internet standards make content-based load distribution difficult. We discuss several approaches to achieve content-based load distribution for large scalable services such as WWW servers. We illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and introduce one method, connection hand-off, which enables content-based load distribution. We describe a small backwards-compatible extension to the TCP protocol to allow connection hand-off and outline the OS implementation required.