SCALABLE APPROACHES TO LOAD SHARING IN THE PRESENCE OF MULTICASTING

This work examines policies based on multicasting for load sharing in a local area network environment. In these policies, lightly-loaded nodes join multicast groups to indicate their ability to accept additional work, and heavily-loaded nodes send multicast messages to locate these lightly-loaded nodes. Simulation is used to study the performance of these load sharing policies and compare them with previously proposed load sharing policies. The results show that multicasting is an efficient method for locating lightly-loaded nodes, yielding better response time compared to previous policies. In addition, the results show that multicast-based policies can be used to lessen network traffic to busy nodes and nodes on remote LANs, while scaling to large numbers of machines.