Patent ID: 7647393

Claim:
A server load balancing apparatus located in front of a plurality of servers connected to a plurality of clients through the Internet, the server load balancing apparatus comprising: a processor coupled to a packet analyzing unit, the packet analyzing unit operates to determine whether a session label has been attached to a received packet, analyzing header information of the received packet to learn session information for the received packet without a session label, and attaching a Client-To-Server (C2S) session label to a header of the received packet; a load balancing processing unit that operates to assign one of the servers to a session of the received packet without a session label attached in view of load balancing; a session label switching unit that operates to hardware-switching the received packet with the C2S session label attached using only the C2S session label information without performing a packet analysis process or server assignment process; a session managing unit for managing and maintaining relevant information and states of sessions requested by the clients; and a session label managing unit for assigning the C2S session label, and withdrawing and managing session labels not in use, wherein the load balancing apparatus uses Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) session labels and analyzes requests from the clients and distributes the requests among the servers, and wherein the one of the servers increments a value of the C2S session label in the received packet by a predetermined number to generate a Server-To-Client (S2C) session label and transmits a response packet including the S2C session label to a requesting client, and wherein the requesting client decrements a value of the S2C session label by the predetermined number to generate the C2S session label and transmits a packet including the C2S session label to the one of the servers.