Overview and Evaluation of the Server Redundancy and Session Failover Mechanisms in the Reliable Server Pooling Framework

The number of availability-critical Internet applications is steadily increasing. To support the development and operation of such applications, the IETF has recently defined a new standard for a common server redundancy and session failover framework: Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool). The basic ideas of the RSerPool framework are not entirely new, but their combination into a single, resource-efficient and unified architecture is. Service availability achieved by the redundancy of servers directly leads to the issues of load distribution and load balancing, which are both important for the performance of RSerPool systems. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the performance of such systems with respect to the load balancing strategy required by the ser-