Multihoming Performance Benefits: An Experimental Evaluation of Practical Enterprise Strategies

Overview

Multihoming is increasingly being employed by large enterprises and data centers as a mechanism to extract good performance from their provider connections. Today, multihomed end-networks can employ a variety of commercial route control products to optimize performance over multiple ISP links. However, little is known about the mechanisms employed by such products and their relative trade-offs. This paper proposes and evaluates a wide range practical schemes that could go into the design of a route control device and analyze their trade-offs. The proposed schemes are implemented on a Linux-based Web proxy and a trace-based emulation is performed of their relative performance benefits.