Cooperative load balancing in distributed systems

A serious difficulty in concurrent programming of a distributed system is how to deal with scheduling and load balancing of such a system which may consist of heterogeneous computers. In this paper, we formulate the static load-balancing problem in single class job distributed systems as a cooperative game among computers. The computers comprising the distributed system are modeled as M/M/1 queueing systems. It is shown that the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) provides an optimal solution (operation point) for the distributed system and it is also a fair solution. We propose a cooperative load-balancing game and present the structure of NBS. For this game an algorithm for computing NBS is derived. We show that the fairness index is always equal to 1 using NBS, which means that the solution is fair to all jobs. Finally, the performance of our cooperative load-balancing scheme is compared with that of other existing schemes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.