US Patent 7738452 Techniques for load balancing subscriber-aware application proxies

Techniques for distributing network traffic from an access server to a service gateway include receiving, at a load balancer, sticky table data that indicates an association between a particular subscriber IP address and a particular subscriber-aware service gateway in a gateway cluster. An input data packet is received with an input source address and an input transport-layer destination. If it is determined that the input transport-layer destination indicates a type of payload that uses a service gateway, then the particular service gateway associated with the particular subscriber is determined based on the sticky table and IP address in the input source address. An output data packet is directed to the particular service gateway using a link-layer or networking-layer destination address. These techniques allow a load balancer to be located anywhere on the network and to bypass a subscriber-aware service gateway for some data traffic.