Effective Request Distributing in Distributed SSL Reverse Proxies

We focus on effective request distributing for locally or globally distributed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) reverse proxies in a Web system. We assume a system consisting of a front-end request distributor and several back-end SSL reverse proxy nodes, each has its own queue for caching requests. The proposed two request distribution strategies SSLSARD-D and SSLSARD-W are both composed of a back-end load estimation algorithm, a request distribution algorithm and a queue resource scheduling algorithm. We test the proposed strategies' performances using a request flow with bursty arrivals. We show that the proposed strategies perform well in reducing packet losses when coming across bursty arrivals, but need to be at the expense of increasing request latency. Comparing with SSLSARD-D, SSLSARD-W provides higher SSL session resumption rate and performs better when the request flow fluctuates greatly.