COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM PROVIDING SERVER LOAD BALANCING BASED UPON LOAD AND SEPARATION METRICS AND RELATED METHODS

A communications system may include a plurality of client devices configured to generate client processing jobs, each having a respective unique client ID associated therewith. A plurality of geographically spaced apart servers may be configured to process the client processing jobs, each having a respective unique server ID associated therewith. A load balancer may be configured to receive the client processing jobs from the plurality of client devices, and for each client processing job, generate a respective load balancing score for each server based upon the client ID of the client device requesting the client processing job, the server ID of each server, a processing load metric for each server, and a separation metric corresponding to a separation between the requesting client device and each server. The load balancer may also be configured to assign each client processing job to a respective server based upon the load balancing scores.