A Novel Service-Aware Message Scheduler for Cisco Application Oriented Networking Systems

Abstract

Cisco Systems' Application Oriented Networking (AON) is an important network element towards building next generation service oriented network. AON processes applicationlevel content and moves far beyond a conventional content-aware web switch. It creates a novel content delivery platform and allows more sophisticated message-level load balancing mechanisms to be deployed in a switch/router in front of back-end servers. In addition to the three existing load balancing algorithms of current AON system, Round Robin (RR), Weighted Round Robin (WRR) and Adpative (ADP), we propose a new intelligent messagetype-based adaptive scheduling algorithm that can maximize system performance with minimal user configuration complexity. We implemented this novel scheduler into AON system and conducted performance studies on all four scheduling schemes in terms of overall throughput, average latency, and server utilization. Experimental results show that our proposed scheduler outperforms the three existing schemes in all evaluation cases.978-1-4244-2390-3/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE