A case study of handling load spikes in authentication systems

by Sverrisson, Kristjon

The user growth in Internet services for the past years has caused a need to re-think methods for user authentication, authorization and accounting for network providers. To deal with this growing demand for Internet services, the underlying user authentication systems have to be able to, among other things, handle load spikes. This can be achieved by using loadbalancing, and there are both adaptive and non-adaptive methods of loadbalancing.This case study compares adaptive and non-adaptive loadbalancing for user authentication in terms of average throughput. To do this we set up a lab where we test two different load-balancing methods; a non-adaptive and a adaptive.The non-adaptive load balancing method is simple, only using a pool of servers to direct the load to in a round-robin way, whereas the adaptive load balancing method tries to direct the load using a calculation of the previous requests.