Network characteristics emerging from agent interactions in balanced distributed system.

A distributed computing system behaves like a complex network, the interactions between nodes being essential information exchanges and migrations of jobs or services to execute. These actions are performed by software agents, which behave like the members of social networks, cooperating and competing to obtain knowledge and services. The load balancing consists in distributing the load evenly between system nodes. It aims at enhancing the resource usage. A load balancing strategy specifies scenarios for the cooperation. Its efficiency depends on quantity, accuracy, and distribution of available information. Nevertheless, the distribution of information on the nodes, together with the initial network structure, may create different logical network structures. In this paper, different load balancing strategies are tested on different network structures using a simulation. The four tested strategies are able to distribute evenly the load so that the system reaches a steady state (the mean response time of the jobs is constant), but it is shown that a given strategy indeed behaves differently according to structural parameters and information spreading. Such a study, devoted to distributed computing systems (DCSs), can be useful to understand and drive the behavior of other complex systems.