Experimental Setup for Investigating the Efficient Load Balancing Algorithms on Virtual Cloud

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Dec 21;20(24):7342. doi: 10.3390/s20247342.

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as the primary choice for developers in developing applications that require high-performance computing. Virtualization technology has helped in the distribution of resources to multiple users. Increased use of cloud infrastructure has led to the challenge of developing a load balancing mechanism to provide optimized use of resources and better performance. Round robin and least connections load balancing algorithms have been developed to allocate user requests across a cluster of servers in the cloud in a time-bound manner. In this paper, we have applied the round robin and least connections approach of load balancing to HAProxy, virtual machine clusters and web servers. The experimental results are visualized and summarized using Apache Jmeter and a further comparative study of round robin and least connections is also depicted. Experimental setup and results show that the round robin algorithm performs better as compared to the least connections algorithm in all measuring parameters of load balancer in this paper.

Keywords: Apache Jmeter; HAProxy; cloud computing; least connections; load balancing/balancer; round robin; virtual machine.