The effect of scheduling discipline on dynamic load sharing in heterogeneous distributed systems

Dynamic load sharing policies have been extensively studied. Most of the previous studies have assumed a homogeneous distributed system with a first-come/first-served (FCFS) node scheduling policy. In addition, job service times and inter-arrival times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. In this paper, we study the impact of these assumptions on the performance of sender-initiated and receiver-initiated dynamic load sharing policies in heterogeneous distributed systems. We consider two node scheduling policies-the FCFS and round-robin (RR) policies. Furthermore, the impact of variance in inter-arrival times and job service times is studied. Our results show that, even in heterogeneous distributed systems, when the RR policy is used, sender-initiated policy is better than the receiver-initiated policy unless the variance in job service times is low. This is an important observation, as most workstations use a scheduling policy that is similar to the RR policy considered in this paper.