Distributing incoming traffic over multiple links

What the example illustrates

The goal for the situation described in this example is to influence the route that a reply to a request takes, rather than to have the world's routing tables determine the "best" route. This goal is desirable because replies to requests can be quite large. Distributing replies across various routes helps to avoid congesting routes or having all replies slowed down by routes that are already congested.

Example: incoming traffic is distributed over WAN links

In this example, as in the splitting of outgoing traffic over multiple links, you configure NetCache so that the IP addresses of its network cards show different source addresses. This configuration is beneficial if you want incoming traffic distributed over multiple links. The reason is that NetCache generates different source addresses, Web servers can respond to different source addresses, and replies can then take different routes through the Internet. In this example, the illustration shows the replies splitting at the Network Access Point (NAP) over three routes.

When replies can take different routes through the Internet, a greater chance exists that all the inbound links reach good utilization.