A client oriented, IP level redirection mechanism

This paper introduces a new approach for implementing transparent client access to network services. Ever increasing load on the Internet has made it essential to design services that are fast, reliable, easily manageable, transparent to access, and that can scale gracefully with load. A common way of achieving this has been replicating services across multiple servers and redirecting clients to different servers depending upon various criteria. Existing schemes are either entirely server or network based. This scheme involves the client network layer actively in redirection. The paper describes the redirection protocol in detail and a FreeBSD based implementation of a testbed. The performance of the mechanism is measured by experiments on the testbed and analyzed. The advantages and disadvantages of client based network level redirection are discussed and some useful applications that it enables are described.