USING MOBILE AGENTS FOR LOAD BALANCING IN PEER-TO-PEER SYSTEMS HOSTING VIRTUAL SERVERS

This study proposes a novel load-balancing algorithm for managing virtual servers in a Peer-To-Peer (P2P) system through mobile agents. The proposed algorithm is implemented in a fully decentralized manner for a structured P2P system. It uses mobile agents and is independent of the geometry of the P2P auxiliary networks. The load-balancing algorithm effectively reduces the load imbalance of the system using the load per unit capacity derived by the mobile agents. A unique feature of the proposed algorithm is the mutual swapping of virtual servers between overloaded and underloaded peers to efficiently use the available resources. The proposed solution has been verified in a P2P environment consisting of peers and embedded glassfish server instances, created dynamically to act as virtual servers.