Distributed Routing for Load Balancing

Abstract

This paper discusses some open-loop and closed-loop control algorithms for an example of a discreteevent system, viz. the routing of arriving tasks from different arrival streams among several possible service stations. We show that it is possible to design open-loop policies that give good performance in a way which is very robust with respect to large changes in the arrival rates. This is possible even though we assume that there is no Online coordination between the routing algorithms for the different arrival streams. Some further improvements of the performance are possible when a simple feedback policy-overflow routing-is implemented. This also gives reasonable robustness of the performance with respect to changes in the service rates. Several different analysis techniques are needed to obtain the analytical and numerical solutions necessary to compare the performance of the different policies. © 1989 IEEE