Load balancing mechanism for a translational bridge environment

摘要

Mechanism for use in an internetworking device incorporating a translational bridging function to provide load balancing across multiple instances of the same destination address. Traffic originating with clients in the transparently bridged domain is distributed over multiple communication paths to the multiple instances of the destination address in the source route bridging domain. The internetworking device sends an explorer frame over each interface in the source route bridging domain to discover all parallel paths to the destination address. The internetworking device receives a response from each instance of the destination address over all possible paths. The routing information contained in the responses is used to create entries in a cache in the internetworking device. Load balancing is performed by using the source address of the transparently bridged clients as a key to select a specific path for each such client. Frames originating with different clients in the transparent bridging domain are then distributed over the selected paths to the same destination address.