How Can I Load Balance Two Wireless Routers?

I am having two routers and two links termineted on the routers respectively. How shouls i load balance traffi

• I am having two routers with single ISP connection on both. How could I load balance traffic between these two routers?

• Answer:

  First it’s very difficult to load balance in such situation where your both links are terminated on two different routers. Next you need to look at your ISP side, where they have connected your links, are they on two different routers on ISP side or they are on single router (Normally ISP wont prefer to have same customer connected to two different router) Remember traffic going out of your router (To internet traffic or output traffic) is much lesser than traffic coming to your router (from internet traffic or input traffic). At any point if you want to see it you can view serial interface utilization for input and output traffic) with an exception if you are using your connectivity for uploading huge data to remote office. Keeping the former in mind if you do not do load balancing on your output side that wont affect your network link performance. Now next thing which you need to look at is how your traffic is being exchanged between your routers and ISP routers. If you are running small network with few prefixes your ISP would have recommended you for not running any routing protocol on WAN links but Static Routes. In that case if your ISP is terminating your both links on same router and have same routes pointed to both the link, then you are already having LOAD BALANCING your input traffic (which actually requires load balancing) If all the above does not match to your scenario then you may - 1/ Move both the link to same router at your end. 2/ use static default route pointing to both the links (if you are not running any routing protocol) 3/ Ask your ISP to move both of your link to same router 4/ Connect one one Ethernet or Fast Ethernet interface of your router to your LAN segment and Run HSRP between them. 5/ Configure HSRP in such a way so that Ethernet of router which is having both the link, become primary. 5/ Point all your host default gateway to HSRP virtual IP. 6/Ask your ISP to pint routes for your prefixes towards both the link. This way you will achieve - Optimal load balancing and your secondary router will be inactive mode, you may keep two interface configured there for swapping them in case of interface failure of your primary router. But you will be loosing high availability of your serial links. Note - keeping two links on two different router gives you optimum high availability but reduced usability. So you need to decide what is your requirement, mission critical or optimum usability.