Abstract

Resource migration in a distributed computer system can be performed for performance enhancement and we call this activity "load balancing with resource migration". We propose a general load balancing model with both job and resource migration and demonstrate how this model applies to the file migration problem in distributed databases. The intractability of this load balancing model suggests obtaining approximate solutions. In this paper, we propose an approximation approach that partitions the distributed system into regions so that resource migration takes place between the regions while job migration occurs within the regions. By using a good rule for partitioning the system into regions, good approximate solutions can be obtained. We present theoretical bounds and experimental results to indicate how our approximation approach can provide close to optimal solutions in many instances.

Citations