An implementation study of an IP layer light-weight cluster control protocol for scalable web cluster systems

Abstract

Web server systems with ever increasing performance are constantly in need. To efficiently satiate this need, web cluster systems, which have been a topic of much research, have been suggested due to its scalability. In this paper, we propose a light-weight cluster control protocol (LCCP) on the IP layer to support scalable web cluster systems. We describe in detail the design and implementation of LCCP on the IP layer as implemented in the Linux operating system. Experimental results demonstrate that our implementation of the web cluster system based on LCCP linearly improves performance as the server nodes increase. Even though the web cluster control protocol is implemented on the IP layer, our experimental results indicate the reliability mechanism absent in the IP layer has little effect on system performance.