Performance Evaluation of First Hop Redundancy Protocol (FHRP)

The rapid increase of connection-demand to the internet application services, and highly traffic network bandwidth is the main reason behind the need to scale reliable network by using edundancy. In order to increase the reliability of the network, downtime must be minimized; redundancy has to be added in the critical parts of the network.
Failures occur on a daily basis due to a variety of reasons, and can impact on the availability of the network. All hosts on the failure part will automatically change over to a new redundant part. The changeover is done by help of First Hop Redundancy Protocol (FHRP). The three main protocols of FHRP are:
Multiple groups Hot Standby Redundancy Protocol version 2 (MHSRPv2),Multiple groups Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (MVRRP), and Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP).
The simulated network based on IEEE 802.3 LAN standard. The network area is assumed belong to building consist of three floors or three different places inside the building, each floor or place has its specific ISP branch from main ISP feed the network with internet services, and each floor has specific equipments and hosts. This work is an enhancement of the existing studies in this field by increasing the redundancy in the network in order to increase the availability of the network. Two ways to test the redundancy in the network using FHRP protocols; the first way is in normal network operation. The second ways is in failure of one of the ISP branches; these tests in order to show the administrator distribution in redundant network. Three independents configurations are done for each of the FHRP protocols; where each configuration has specific protocol parameters value by changing it; except for the first configuration; the parameters is in default value. The purpose of these three configurations is to show its effect on the performance of the network that are: CPU utilization, bandwidth utilization by protocol, convergence time, and response time.
The results show that there is no certain protocol characterized against the others when applied the same conditions. When changed the parameters value; MVRRP protocol is better by 75% than MHSRPv2 and GLBP. In default parameters value; the obtained results is equal between MHSRPv2 and MVRRP by 45% for each. Often GLBP protocol results are higher than MHSRPv2 and MVRRP in changing and in default parameters value.