Two system state calculation algorithms for optimal load balancing

The author introduces and explains two algorithms, OFCup and OFCdown, allowing one to calculate the global state of a decentralized distributed system by interpreting measurements that are easy to obtain to facilitate cooperative optimal load balancing without a central job dispatcher. The information required is exchanged using the communication protocol of a receiver-initiated load balancing policy and does not induce any additional message transmission overhead. The author presents and interprets measurements from simulation. These studies show that the performance of systems applying any of the OFCx algorithms is significantly better than a no-information policy called 'random routing' and induces only little additional waiting time compared to the M/D/n model. This is true even for high transmission times relative to the mean time between system state changes. Both algorithms are shown to perform equally well under normal conditions with better variance values of OFC-down, but the degradation of OFCdown is significantly worse than that of OFCup, if the not-accept-counter is not incremented at the time expected.<>