US 7,734,815 B2Granted

Global load balancing across mirrored data centers

AssigneeAkamai Technologies, Inc.

InventorsF. Thomson Leighton, Daniel M. Lewin, Ravi Sundaram, Rizwan S. Dhanidina, Robert Kleinberg, Matthew Levine, Adrian M. Soviani, Bruce Maggs, Hariharan Shankar Rahul, Srikanth Thirumalai, Jay Gunvantrai Parikh, Yoav O. Yerushalmi

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Abstract

The invention is an intelligent traffic redirection system that does global load balancing. It can be used in any situation where an end-user requires access to a replicated resource. The method directs end-users to the appropriate replica so that the route to the replica is good from a network standpoint and the replica is not overloaded. The technique preferably uses a Domain Name Service (DNS) to provide IP addresses for the appropriate replica. The most common use is to direct traffic to a mirrored web site.

Claims8

Dependent claims

A method of determining which of a set of mirror sites should receive a request to a domain that is replicated at the set of mirror sites, comprising:

generating a network map during a map generation process according to the following sub-steps:
identifying a set of proxy points, each proxy point being identified by directing a trace route from each of a set of mirror sites toward a given name server and determining a given point in the Internet where the trace routes from each of the set of mirror sites intersect;
probing each of the proxy points from each of the set of mirror sites to generate latency and packet loss data;
generating a score for each mirror site based on the latency and packet loss data generated by probing the proxy points, wherein the score is a function of a time-weighted average of latency modified by a penalty factor that is a function of a time-weighted average of packet loss;
identifying which mirror site provides a best performance based on the score;
and
associating a given name server IP address with the identified mirror site to generate the network map;
and
upon completion of the map generation process, receiving a request at a name server associated with the network map;
and
having the name server associated with the network map use the network map to return an IP address identifying a preferred mirror site to service the request.

8 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.