Desirable Features For Load Balancing Algorithm

There are various factors that should be considered while designing a load balancing algorithm. These are:

• A good algorithm should work without any prior knowledge of the resource demand of a process which will prevent the communication overheads by the user.
• It should be able to handle the load dynamically as in real time the processes are always coming to the system. A static approach may not prove useful in real time scenarios.
• The techniques used for allocating the resource to a process should be efficient and fast so that the processes do not suffer from a long waiting time. One of the approach is to use heuristics.
• It should work with minimum need to communicate with other nodes to know about their states.
• It must ensure that real work is being done instead of just switching nodes to prevent processor thrashing.
• The algorithm should have high reliability and be able to manage the work even if one of the nodes crash or fails.
• It must ensure that all users’ work is done simultaneously and no user is made to wait for his task to be completed so that process starvation can be prevented.

The responsibility of managing the resources in a distributed system lies with the distributed operating system (DOS). It assigns the resources to the various processes when the job is submitted by the user for processing. Every process must be assigned resources according to various factors and algorithms so that no user feels that his requests are facing starvation.