What is Load Balancing

To support QoS in today’s Internet, several new architecture models have been proposed (Striegel, A., & Manimaran, G. (2002)). Traffic engineering has become a key issue within these new architectures, as supporting QoS requires more sophisticated resource management tools. Traffic engineering aims to optimize the performance of operational networks. The main objective is to reduce congestion hot spots and improve resource utilization. This can be achieved by setting up explicit routes through the physical network in such a way that the traffic distribution is balanced across several traffic trunks. This load balancing technique can be achieved by multicommodity network flow (Pioro, M., & Medhi, D. (2004)) formulation. This leads to the traffic being shared over multiple routes between the ingress node and the egress nodes in order to avoid link saturation and hence the possibility of congestion, which is the inability to transmit a volume of information with the established capacities for a particular equipment or network.