An Extenics-based Load Balancing Mechanism in Distributed Computing Systems

In distributed computing systems, load balancing is one of the most important factors that affect the system performance. This paper presents a sender-initiated dynamic load balancing policies in a distributed computing system. There are four policies consisted in the proposed Extenics-based Load Balancing Mechanism (ELBM). For the transfer policy, instead of defining a fixed threshold value in the traditional load balancing policies, we are applying the extension set theory and using the average response time of jobs as a factor to create an adaptive threshold value which is calculated by relational function of average response time, for determining that a new arriving job should be migrated or not. In addition to the transfer policy, bypass-transfer method is used in the location policy. Jobs that need to be migrated do not need to be transferred to central node first, but are transferred to destination node directly, so as to reduce the communication costs. In order to make the system more reliable, a template queue is added at the master node of the system to reduce the job arrival failure. A simulation model has been built for evaluating the performance of the system. Comparing with other load balancing mechanisms, such as RT and ALBCII algorithms, the simulation results show that a better performance can be achieved by the proposed mechanism.