Load balancing strategies for TINA networks

TINA is an open, object oriented, distributed telecom architecture, with many concepts taken directly from the latest computer research. In TINA, instances of the same object type can be placed on different physical nodes. Therefore, the network performance can be improved by introducing load balancing algorithms. These algorithms should distribute the traffic between the object instances in such way that the overall throughput and setup time are improved. We discuss and examine a number of simple distributed load balancing algorithms, that do not require any extra load information exchange between the nodes. The results show that it is difficult to find an algorithm that behave well for all traffic situations. The main problem is that the algorithms have not enough information about the load situation on the different nodes, since no load information is exchanged between the nodes. This problem can be solved by adding the feasibility of load status information to the TINA protocols