Dynamic load balancing with token-passing in a distributed system

In a distributed system, the jobs interarrival is not uniform and the heterogeneous nature of the hosts would imply different performance for different systems and, therefore, some mechanism of distributing the load is needed. The aim of evenly distributing jobs between hosts has led to many strategies. In this paper, the idea of token passing has been adopted and applied in the environment of such systems. Two new policies of load balancing are investigated: source-initiative and server-initiative with token passing. In the former, a certain host may send some of its surplus jobs to be performed in other site(s); while in the latter, the most lightly loaded node may offer a service to the node(s) which is/are heavily loaded. Only the host which possesses the token has the right to talk. Simulation results show the efficiency of using load balancing against the situation in which no load balancing is applied