Towards a load balancer architecture for multi-core mobile communication systems

Due to the exponential growth of the mobile communication systems in the past decade, more efforts have been invested in performance increase solutions which should satisfy the increasing demand for resource hungry applications. Since the computational power provided by single processing units seems to grow slower compared to the application needs, it is generally accepted that a suitable solution can be implemented using multi-core architectures which aim to provide a better balance between performance, power consumption, flexibility and scalability. In this paper we discuss the problem of scheduling and load balancing alternatives for virtualized run-time environments. Based on the virtualization concept, we summarize the most common approaches in scheduling techniques for embedded mobile communication systems. Considering the shortcomings of single core architectures for embedded mobile communication systems, a future architecture is presented, which has been proposed by the eMuCo project in the context of an European research project. Last but not least, we focus on a critical component in the future embedded system that aims to distribute and balance the load in order to ensure an optimal distribution of threads on the available cores and to eventually reduce power consumption. A variant of the architecture of the load balancer and its integration into the complete system is described.