Effective Load Balancing on a LAN-WLAN Cluster

Fixed networks of computers constitute the lowest cost as well as the most available parallel computer, however the proliferation of wireless devices allows to expand the parallel virtual machine. These clusters are composite by resources with different performances and also are connected by communication links with different bandwidth, such as Fast-Ethernet, Standard Ethernet and Standard IEEE 802.11. Execution of a parallel application in these environments without keeping in mind the above considerations can imply that some nodes with least performance can be overhead, while other can be in an idle state. Therefore, in order to avoid this situation, it is necessary to apply some scheme of load balancing. In this paper we present a new dynamic load balancing strategy for LAN-WLAN clusters. ∗ Research partially supported by Spanish CICYT under Contract: TIC2001-0956-C04-03, by ULPGC under Contract: UNI 2002/17 and by the Fundación Canaria Universitaria de Las Palmas, Lopesan, S.A. and Unelco, S.A.