Load balancing in a distributed network environment : an ant colony inspired approach

With the incidence of technology at each and every juncture of human life, there has been an accelerated growth in computational needs to satisfy the technological cravings. Computer networks have evolutionarily emerged and have evolved as life blood of today’s global communication challenges. To fulfil the dynamic needs of present day networks, distributed and parallel computing applications are gaining momentum rapidly. Distributed networks have apparently become a better choice favouring the processing of large scale intensive applications which was previously unimaginable. However, it is evident that the load on a network is always relative to the volume of the application being processed. Eventually if the load on the network is not fairly distributed among all the available processing elements, it might result in improper resource usage and degraded network performance. Efficient load balancing approaches are essential to achieve proportional distribution of load among the network nodes to preserve the overall system integrity. Therefore, the process of identifying an efficient method to achieve proportional distribution of load is of paramount importance. To achieve an affective balance in load, this thesis investigates into an already existing Ant Colony based prototype called Messor and establishes a new approach based on dynamic load table concept augmented with ant search using Artificial Neural Networks. The proposed approach is simulated on a software based model network and the results are presented. The performance of the approach is evaluated based on certain performance criteria