Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP) as the name implies can be used to configure Gateway redundancy between a group of routers and at the same time load balance the traffic across all of them. GLBP is similar to the High availability protocols Hot Standby Redundancy Protocol (HSRP) & Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) except for the load balancing capabilities wherein HSRP and VRRP, the standby routers are configured for redundancy and act as standby only and become active only when the active router fails.
The advantage of GLBP is it provides load balancing over multiple routers (gateways) using a single virtual IP address and multiple virtual MAC addresses. The forwarding load is shared among all routers in a GLBP group rather than being handled by a single router while the other routers stand idle. Each host is configured with the same virtual IP address, and all routers in the virtual router group participate in forwarding packets. GLBP members communicate between each other through hello messages sent every 3 seconds to the multicast address 224.0.0.102, User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port 3222 (source and destination).