Noncooperative load balancing in distributed systems

In this paper, we present a game theoretic framework for obtaining a user-optimal load balancing scheme in heterogeneous distributed systems. We formulate the static load balancing problem in heterogeneous distributed systems as a noncooperative game among users. For the proposed noncooperative load balancing game, we present the structure of the Nash equilibrium. Based on this structure we derive a new distributed load balancing algorithm. Finally, the performance of our noncooperative load balancing scheme is compared with that of other existing schemes. The main advantages of our load balancing scheme are the distributed structure, low complexity and optimality of allocation for each user. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.