Load balancing in distributed systems: an approach using cooperative games

Abstract

In this paper we formulate the static load balancing problem in single class job distributed systems as a cooperative game among computers. It is shown that the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) provides a Pareto optimal allocation which is also fair to all jobs. We propose a cooperative load balancing game and present the structure of the NBS For this game an algorithm for computing NBS is derived. We show that the fairness index is, always 1 using NBS which means that the allocation is fair to all jobs. Finally, the performance of our cooperative load balancing scheme is compared with that of other existing schemes.