A Location-Aware Strategy for Agents Negotiating Load-balancing

We study a novel location-aware strategy for distributed systems where cooperating agents perform the load-balancing. The strategy allows agents to identify opportunities within a current unbalanced allocation, which in turn triggers concurrent and one-to many negotiations amongst agents to locally reallocate some tasks. The tasks are reallocated according to the proximity of the resources and they are performed in accordance with the capabilities of the nodes in which agents are situated. This dynamic and on-going negotiation process takes place concurrently with the task execution and so the task allocation process is adaptive to disruptions (task consumption, slowing down nodes). We evaluate the strategy in a multi-agent deployment of the MapReduce design pattern for processing large datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that our strategy significantly improves the overall runtime of the data processing.