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Electronic content made available over the Internet is becoming increasingly
important for providers and users alike. To provide the best possible
service to end users it is desirable for content to be network-wise as
close to client hosts as possible.
Static mirrors of sites are one means of distributing traffic between sites
and giving users the opportunity to connect to a site that will give them a
fast response. However, manually selecting sites, which may or may not be
available, from a list of mirrors is a tedious process. The sites at the
top of the list are a tempting choice --- economy of choice in lieu of the
possibility of faster access.
Instead of expecting users to manually select a mirror, it makes sense for
the service provider to automatically direct clients to a site that will
offer them good performance, that is to have a global load balancing
algorithm in place. One such algorithm is to use BGP to select which site
has the least cost path to a given client. This paper will examine the
implementation of such an load balancing scheme.
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