Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the following load balancing algorithm. At each step, each node in a network examines the number of tokens at each of its neighbors and sends a token to each neighbor with at least 2d + 1 fewer tokens, where d is the maximum degree of any node in the network. We show that within O(∆/α) steps, the algorithm reduces the maximum difference in tokens between any two nodes to at most O((d 2 log n)/α), where ∆ is the global imbalance in tokens (i.e., the maximum difference between the number of tokens at any node initially and the average number of tokens), n is the number of nodes in the network, and α is the edge expansion of the network. The time bound is tight in the sense that for any graph with edge expansion α, and for any value ∆, there exists an initial distribution of tokens with imbalance ∆ for which the time to reduce the imbalance to even ∆/2 is at least Ω(∆/α). The bound on the final imbalance is tight in the sense that there exists a class of networks that can be locally balanced everywhere (i.e., the maximum difference in tokens between any two neighbors is at most 2d), while the global imbalance remains Ω((d 2 log n)/α). Furthermore, we show that upon reaching a state with a global imbalance of O((d 2 log n)/α), the time for this algorithm to locally balance the network can be as large as Ω(n 1/2). We extend our analysis to a variant of this algorithm for dynamic and asynchronous

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