Implementation of a Horizontal Scalable Balancer for Dew Computing Services

Abstract

Cloud, fog and dew computing concepts offer elastic resources that can serve scalable services. These resources can be scaled horizontally or vertically. The former is more powerful, which increases the number of same machines (scaled out) to retain the performance of the service. However, this scaling is tightly connected with the existence of a balancer in front of the scaled resources that will balance the load among the end points. In this paper, we present a successful implementation of a scalable low-level load balancer, implemented on the network layer. The scalability is tested by a series of experiments for a small scale servers providing services in the range of dew computing services. The experiments showed that it adds small latency of several milliseconds and thus it slightly reduces the performance when the distributed system is underutilized. However, the results show that the balancer achieves even a super-linear speedup (speedup greater than the number of scaled resources) for a greater load. The paper discusses also many other benefits that the balancer provides.