A heuristic approach to resource locations in broadband networks

In broadband networks, such as ATM, the importance of dynamic migration of data resources is increasing because of its potential to improve performance especially for transaction processing. In environments with migratory data resources, it is necessary to have mechanisms to manage the locations of each data resource. In this paper, we present an algorithm that makes use of system state information (state of each site corresponding to all data resources) and heuristics to manage locations of data resources in a distributed network. In the proposed algorithm, each site maintains information about state of other sites with respect to each data resource of the system and uses it to find (i) a subset of sites likely to have the requested data resource and (ii) the site where the data resource is to be migrated from the current site. The proposed algorithm enhances its effectiveness by continuously updating system state information stored at each site. It focuses on reducing the overall average time delay needed by the transaction requests to locate and access the migratory data resources. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm and have also compared it with one of the existing location management algorithms, by simulation studies under several system parameters such as frequency of requests generation, frequency of data resource migrations, network topology and scale of network. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in all cases.