The Effect of Scheduling Discipline on Dynamic Load Sharing in Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

− Dynamic load sharing policies have been extensively studied. Most of the previous studies have assumed a homogeneous distributed system with a first-come-first-served (FCFS) node scheduling policy. In addition, job service times and inter-arrival times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. In this paper, we study the impact of these assumptions on the performance of sender-initiated and receiver-initiated dynamic load sharing policies in heterogeneous distributed systems. We consider two node scheduling policies − first-come/first-served (FCFS) and round robin (RR) policies. Furthermore, the impact of variance in inter-arrival times and job service times is studied. Our results show that, even in heterogeneous distributed systems, when the round robin node scheduling policy is used, senderinitiated policy is better than the receiver-initiated policy unless the variance in job service times is low. This is an important observation as most workstations use a scheduling policy similar to the round robin policy considered here.