Network load balancing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:45, 19 June 2025

Latest revision as of 14:13, 13 August 2025

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{{Short description|Ability to balance computer network traffic}}

'''Network load balancing''' is the ability to balance traffic across two or more [[Wide area network|WAN]] links without using complex [[Routing protocol|routing protocols]] like [[Border Gateway Protocol|BGP]].

This capability balances network sessions like Web, <!-- "Web" should be capitalized because it is the shortened form of the proper noun "World Wide Web" --> email, etc. over multiple connections in order to spread out the amount of [[Bandwidth (computing)|bandwidth]] used by each [[Local area network|LAN]] user, thus increasing the total amount of bandwidth available. For example, a user has a single WAN connection to the [[Internet]] operating at 1.5&nbsp;Mbit/s. They wish to add a second broadband (cable, DSL, wireless, etc.) connection operating at 2.5&nbsp;Mbit/s. This would provide them with a total of 4&nbsp;Mbit/s of bandwidth when balancing sessions.

Session balancing does just that, it balances sessions across each WAN link. When Web browsers connect to the Internet, they commonly open multiple sessions, one for the text, another for an image, another for some other image, etc. These sessions can be balanced across the available connections. An [[fileFile transferTransfer protocolProtocol|FTP]] application only uses a single session so it is not balanced; however if a secondary FTP connection is made, then it may be balanced so that the traffic is distributed across two of the various connections and thus provides an overall increase in throughput.

Additionally, network load balancing is commonly used to provide network [[Redundancy (engineering)|redundancy]] so that in the event of a WAN link outage, access to network resources is still available via the secondary link(s). Redundancy is a key requirement for [[business continuity]] plans and generally used in conjunction with critical applications like [[VPN]]s and [[VoIP]].