Multidomain Load Balancing.

This paper investigates dynamic load balancing issues in the multidomain environment where local area networks (LANs) are interconnected by the Internet. Because of the much slower Internet communication speed and limited bandwidth, existing load balancing algorithms for LANs are unsuitable for the multidomain environment. New issues such as lag time in updating load information and network cost of transferring jobs must be addressed. To tackle these problems, the conventional least load scheduler is extended to the multidomain environment by employing a hierarchical structure, and several quick update techniques are proposed. Also, a heuristic taking both the machine load and the network cost into consideration is developed to evaluate the benefits of sending jobs to computers in different domains. A set of experiments conducted on the BALANCE testbed showed that the proposed techniques provide significant performance improvement over existing algorithms.