The Research Of Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol With Load Balancing

Gateway redundancy is very popular as important technology of disaster recovery of computer networks. The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) and Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) are designed to eliminate the single point of failure and have been widely used in a LAN environment. However, neither of them supports load balancing between the primary router and backup routers for both incoming and outgoing traffic. The backup router will start to route packets only when the master router fails. Since the backup router will be idle when there is no failure, the resource in the backup router is wasted most of the time. This paper describes AVRRP, i.e. Advanced VRRP, which is designed based on the standard VRRP. AVRRP focuses symmetric load balancing among routers and is backward compatible and supports all the standard VRRP features.