Load Balancing (computing) - Use in Telecommunications

Use in Telecommunications

Load balancing can be useful in applications with redundant communications links. For example, a company may have multiple Internet connections ensuring network access if one of the connections fails.

A failover arrangement would mean that one link is designated for normal use, while the second link is used only if the primary link fails.

Using load balancing, both links can be in use all the time. A device or program monitors the availability of all links and selects the path for sending packets. Use of multiple links simultaneously increases the available bandwidth.

Many telecommunications companies have multiple routes through their networks or to external networks. They use sophisticated load balancing to shift traffic from one path to another to avoid network congestion on any particular link, and sometimes to minimize the cost of transit across external networks or improve network reliability.

Another way of using load balancing is in network monitoring activities. Load balancers can be used to split huge data flows into several sub-flows and use several network analyzers, each reading a part of the original data. This is very useful for monitoring fast networks like 10GbE or STM64, where complex processing of the data may not be possible at wire speed.