OPTIMAL LOAD BALANCING IN TREE NETWORKS WITH 2-WAY TRAFFIC

We study the static load balancing in a distributed computer system that consists of a set of heterogeneous host computers interconnected by a tree network with two-way traffic. The static load balancing problem is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. We demonstrate that the particular structure of the optimization problem can be solved by a decomposition technique. An algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal solution. The proposed algorithm is compared with other two well known algorithms: the FD (Flow Deviation) algorithm and the Dafermos algorithm. It is shown that the proposed algorithm requires less storage and spends the least computation time to converge to the optimal solution.