Optimal resource pooling over legacy equal-split load balancing schemes

In this paper we present a flexible and effective traffic splitting method that is incrementally deployable and fully compatible with practically all existing protocols and data planes. Our proposal, called Virtual Resource Allocation (VRA), is based on setting up virtual resources alongside existing ones, thereby tricking the legacy equal traffic splitting technology into realizing the required non-equal traffic division over the physical media. We propose several VRA schemes, give theoretical bounds on their performance, and also show that the full-fledged VRA problem is NP-complete in general. Accordingly, we provide solution algorithms, including an optimal, but necessarily slow method and several quick heuristics. Our simulations show that VRA has huge practical potential as it allows approaching an ideal traffic split using only a very limited set of virtual resources. Based on the results, we also give detailed suggestions on which algorithm to apply in different scenarios.