Multiple Internet Connections by Balancing Traffic and Managing Failover with Zeroshell
Multiple Internet Connections by Balancing Traffic and Managing Failover With Zeroshell The purpose of this document is to describe the creation of a router to access a network that uses multiple Internet connections in order to balance the outgoing LAN demand and to obtain network access redundancy, managing fault situations for one or multiple lines. To reach our objective, we shall use the Net Balancer module by Zeroshell. Lastly, we shall examine the possibility of aggregation (Bonding) of VPN aimed at increasing the bandwidth for point-to-point connection between remote locations via the Internet. Is it really possible to increase the Internet connection bandwidth? The answer to this question is not, "yes, absolutely." It depends on what you mean by increasing the Internet connection bandwidth. In essence, the Net Balancer distributes requests originating from the LAN by round-robin (weighed) policy over multiple Internet gateways. In other words, if at a given point in time there is only one LAN user making only one TCP connection (e.g. he executes only one download from the web), his traffic will flow from a single gateway, thus it would not benefit from balanced connections. Instead, if the LAN is crowded with users, each executing multiple requests at the same time, as a whole, their connections will have access to a higher bandwidth, equal to the sum of the single-access bandwidths. We then conclude that a single connection may never have more bandwidth than what offered by a single link, while multiple simultaneous connections will, on average, altogether have access to a greater bandwidth, which will stretch to the sum of the bandwidths of all the Internet links being balanced.
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