Load balancing is a mechanism to distribute client requests among several service instances. It enables resource utilization, lowers response time, and increases user satisfaction. In Named-Data Networking (NDN) and NDN-like architectures, load balancing becomes crucial when dynamic services are present, where relying solely on forwarding strategies can overload certain service instances while others are underutilized especially with the limited benefit of on-path caching when it comes to services. To understand the challenges and opportunities of load balancing in NDN, we analyze conventional load balancing in IP networks, and three closely related fields in NDN: congestion control, forwarding strategies, and data center management. We identify three possible scenarios for load balancing in NDN: facade load balancer, controller for Interest queues, and router-based load balancing. These different solutions use different metrics to identify the load on replicas, have different compliance levels with NDN, and place the load balancing functionality in different network components. From our findings, we propose and implement a new lightweight router-based load balancing approach called the communicating vessels and experimentally show how it reduces service response time and senses server capabilities without probing.

中文翻译：

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命名数据网络中存在服务时的负载平衡

负载均衡是一种在多个服务实例之间分配客户端请求的机制。它可以实现资源利用率、缩短响应时间并提高用户满意度。在命名数据网络 (NDN) 和类似 NDN 的架构中，当存在动态服务时，负载平衡变得至关重要，在这种情况下，仅依赖转发策略可能会使某些服务实例过载，而其他服务实例未得到充分利用，尤其是在路径缓存的优势有限时说到服务。为了理解 NDN 中负载均衡的挑战和机遇，我们分析了 IP 网络中传统的负载均衡，以及 NDN 中三个密切相关的领域：拥塞控制、转发策略和数据中心管理。我们确定了 NDN 中负载均衡的三种可能场景：门面负载均衡器、兴趣队列控制器和基于路由器的负载平衡。这些不同的解决方案使用不同的指标来识别副本上的负载，对 NDN 具有不同的合规性级别，并将负载平衡功能放置在不同的网络组件中。根据我们的研究结果，我们提出并实施了一种新的基于轻量级路由器的负载平衡方法，称为通信容器，并通过实验展示了它如何减少服务响应时间和无需探测即可感知服务器功能。