Integrating trading and load balancing for efficient management of services in distributed systems

Due to the requirements of open service markets, the structure of networks and application systems is changing. To handle the evolving complex distributed systems, new concepts for an efficient management of such systems have to be developed. Focussing on the service level, examples for existing concepts are trading, to find services in a distributed environment, and load balancing, to avoid performance bottlenecks in service provision. This paper deals with the integration of a trader and a load balancer. The allocation of client requests to suitable servers is adaptable depending on the current system usage and thus the quality of the services used is increased in terms of performance. The approach used is independent of the servers’ characteristics, as no provision of additional service properties to cover load aspects is necessary for the servers involved. Furthermore, it may be flexibly enhanced, as the concept of ‘load’ used can be varied without modification of trader or load balancer. This approach was implemented and evaluated in several scenarios.