Dynamic distribution technique for session management in CWMP server clusters

An appropriate session management technique is crucial in CPE WAN (customer premises equipment code area method) management protocol (CWMP) to efficiently handle numerous sessions. In addition, with the rapid growth of mobile devices, more clients with wireless links result in an environment with possibly higher connection failure rates (CFRs). To improve the resource utilisation in a server cluster, the feature of predictable numbers of connections in all CWMP sessions is used to design a dynamic distribution (DD) technique. By adaptively choosing an appropriate session management strategy, the proposed DD technique helps to minimise memory and time consumption in different network situations. When the network situation is good or there are only a small number of connections, DD distributes each session to a single cluster node. However, as the CFR increases with a large number of connections, DD replicates a session to a number of cluster nodes, but not to all cluster nodes. Furthermore, as the network situation improves, the replicated sessions are adaptively removed so as to reduce memory usage. Experimental results show that the DD approach generally outperforms previous techniques in terms of both memory and time consumption, especially when the CFR is higher than 2.8%.