Autonomic load balancing for M2M communication with long-polling. (1st January 2013) - Kitagami, Shinji
In a machine-to-machine (M2M) service system that connects devices to the internet and which provides various remote services, long-polling communication is effective as a communication protocol that simultaneously satisfies requirements of both security and immediacy. It sustains a communication session among devices and servers for a definite period. For this reason, when a medium server for load balancing is introduced into a large-scale M2M service system, it might cause a performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose an autonomic control method to achieve load distribution and load levelling using only devices and servers, without introducing a medium server. In the proposed method, the device selects the server to connect the subsequent time based on server load information that the server sends to the device when long polling has timed out. In addition, this method achieves levelling of the server load by exchanging load indices among servers.