Managing Services in Distributed Systems by Integrating Trading and Load Balancing

With a changing structure of networks and application systems due to the requirements of decentralised enterprises and open service markets, distributed systems with rapidly increasing complexity are evolving. 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 discusses the integration of a load balancer into a trader to adapt the allocation of client requests to suitable servers due to the current system usage, and thus to improve the quality of the services in terms of performance. The approach used is independent of the servers characteristics, because for the servers involved, no provision of additional service properties to cover load aspects is necessary. Furthermore, it is flexible to enhance, because the concept of load used can be varied without modification of trader or load balancer.