Performance of Probing and Coordinated Load Sharing

The performance of a distributed system is limited by how good the load sharing scheme used in the system is. Load sharing is the process of sharing computational resources by distributing the load in the system among the various networked computers. Many load sharing schemes in the literature are based on a node probing other nodes in the system in order to find a suitable one for load sharing. This paper proposes a new coordinated scheme where load state information at each node is centrally collected by a coordinator to optimize the transfer policy of the scheme. This information is periodically broadcasted to all nodes for decentralizing the decision making for best load allocation policy. The difference between the probing and coordinated schemes is discussed in this paper and their performance analyzed. Simulation results have showed that the coordinated scheme can perform better in overloaded larger clusters of computers.