Updated Date: 09/29/2026
Introduction
You can configure the BIG-IP® system to manage electronic trading traffic for both low-latency and intelligent load balancing. The BIG-IP system supports the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol connections for electronic trading between financial institutions.
The Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM®) FIX profile of the BIG-IP® system allows you to use the FIX protocol messages in routing, load balancing, persisting, and logging connections. The BIG-IP system uses the FIX profile to examine the header, body, and footer of each FIX message. Later, each message is processed accordingly based on the included parameters.
When you acquire a special license, you can use the FastL4 profile to optimize the FIX connections. To minimize jitter, you can use the embedded Packet Velocity® ASIC (ePVA) of iSeries, and ATSE of rSeries. Enable the Late Binding feature in the Fast L4 profile to use an iRule for implementing intelligent load balancing. Then, create an iRule that parses each FIX header to choose a backend server pool.
The BIG-IP system supports the FIX protocol versions 4.2, 4.4, and 5.0, and uses the key-value pair FIX message format.
You can experience:
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FIX reduces the time and installation charges of complex networks that connect various trading terminals situated across different countries.
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Reduced operational risks as it requires minimal manual intervention while processing orders.
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Increases the efficiencies of the trader, broker, or dealer side by reducing the time of price and execution data transmission.
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Order logging mechanism helps in getting audit trail of orders in doing post-trade analysis and for compliance purpose.
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Staffing costs for the organization have been reduced as a few traders can do more punching of orders using FIX protocol. FIX APIs are integrated with trading software easily, which has resulted in trading software vendors developing new Algo strategies at a growing rate.
BIG-IP supports three different solutions for FIX environments. They are:
- Layer7 FIX proxy w/iRule support
- Layer4 FIX Low Latency mode
- Hybrid or Late Binding mode, which combines Layer7 FIX parsing/routing and Layer4 Low Latency.
The Layer 7 FIX proxy provides connection steering based on FIX tags such as SenderCompID. This mode provides FIX message-level visibility and control using the logging of FIX messages, parsing, and message validation, and collection of FIX profile statistics. FIX tag substitutions can also be performed. A FIX profile can be leveraged as well as FIX iRules.
The FIX Low Latency mode will perform layer 4 load balancing of FIX connections and provide hardware acceleration to provide dedicated low latency forwarding and reduced jitter, which is critical in high-frequency trading environments.
FIX Low Latency mode is available on specific models of hardware appliances (iSeries / rSeries) that are equipped with either ePVA or ATSE FPGAs. The iSeries models supporting the FIX Low Latency mode are i5800, i7800, i10800, i11800, and i15800. Only ix800 models (i5000 and higher) support the FIX Low Latency mode. However, ix600 models do not support the FIX Low Latency mode. For the rSeries, the FIX Low Latency mode is enabled in all the r5000, r10000, and r12000 models.
The PVA hardware does not examine the FIX packets that stream through it, so FIX profile features such as parsing and tag substitution are not supported with low latency.
In the hybrid mode, the FIX parsing is done during the initial connection setup only. FIX parsing is not possible after the routing or selection of a pool member.
Induced latency, which is the latency realized after a FIX connection is established, typically has a duration of about five to seven µsecs, depending on the selected platform.
The FIX implementation only supports the TCP protocol, which requires FIX clients and servers to establish TCP connections. When creating a virtual server to manage the traffic for low latency electronic trading, you must specify the TCP protocol setting.
You can use low latency electronic trading in a Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) or Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) environment, with a last-hop pool configured with a single pool member to maintain acceleration flows. When using low latency electronic trading in an HSRP or VRRP environment, you must set the db variable tmlhpnomemberaction to 2, enabling the BIG-IP® system to route only the client traffic back through a pool member defined in the last hop pool. Additionally, in this configuration, the system can respond to client traffic that originates from an address other than an address defined in the last hop pool.
Example
For example, consider the following configuration.
- Router 1 has an IP address of
10.1.1.251. - Router 2 has an IP address of
10.1.1.252. - Last-hop pool member has a virtual IP address of
10.1.1.254.
In this example, you create a last-hop pool with a single pool member that is assigned with a virtual IP address of 10.1.1.254. You can then use the following tmsh command to set the db variable tmlhpnomemberaction to 2.
tmsh modify /sys db tm.lhpnomemberaction value 2Typically, you will want to use a transparent monitor on the last-hop pool.
You can configure FIX low latency (FIX LL) with the following systems and software versions:
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BIG-IP i5800, i7800, i10800, i11800, i15800 systems that are running BIG-IP software version 14.1.0 and above.
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BIG-IP r5600, r5800, r5900, r5920-DF, r10600, r10800, r10900, r10920-DF, r12600-DS, r12800-DS and r12900-DS systems that are running F5OS-A 1.4.0 and above with BIG-IP tenant software version 15.1.5 and above 15.1.x, 17.1.0 and above 17.1.x.
Note: The customized firmware does not work with vCMP on iSeries.
The Hybrid or Late Binding mode combines layer 7 parsing at the initial connection time to make an intelligent pool member selection based on the FIX SenderCompID field and then accelerates the flow at layer 4, providing dedicated low latency during the rest of the connection.
With the Late Binding feature enabled, an iRule can examine the FIX logon packet which establishes the connection, and choose a server pool based on the packet’s contents. The iRule finishes by sending the connection down to the ePVA hardware, which processes the stream at low latency.
The only TCP options available to the client and server are MSS, except Selective ACK and Time Stamp. The BIG-IP system ignores all other options because it must enable SYN cookies on the client-side interface and because the ePVA hardware does not process any of those options. For example, the BIG-IP system ignores the Window Scaling option as soon as the flow has been released to the ePVA hardware.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is not supported by a virtual server that uses Late Binding.
To use a BIG-IP system to manage low latency electronic trading functionality, you must first acquire a specific license. The license must enable FIX Low Latency features:
- Advanced LTM Protocols
- FIX Low Latency
Please contact your F5 Networks support representative to acquire the necessary license.