Patent ID: 8201219

Claim:
A method of load balancing among a plurality of access control servers within a network, comprising: (a) receiving a request from a client for an access control server assignment; (b) determining if the client is currently assigned to one of a plurality of access control servers; (c) in response to determining that the client is not currently assigned to the one of the access control servers, identifying an available access control server based on a server load, wherein the server load is derived from one or more application load and machine capacity metrics as reported by the available access control server; (d) assigning the client to the available access control server identified in step (c) to form an assignment between the client and the available access control server; and (e) communicating the assignment to the client via an authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) communications protocol, wherein the communicating includes: communicating to the client the assignment in Diameter Attribute Value Pairs (AVPs) by: setting a Result-Code attribute to a REDIRECT NOTIFICATION value indicating to the client that future commands should be redirected to the available access control server; defining a scope of the redirect by setting a Redirect-Host-Usage attribute to an ALL HOST value; setting a Redirect-Host attribute to the available access control server's IP address; and setting a Redirect-Max-Cache-Time attribute to the duration of the redirect in seconds.