A policy independent metric for process selection in distributed systems

Process migration is a means of achieving load sharing and load balancing in distributed systems. The research to date either seeks to minimize networked interprocess communication or to create process migration mechanisms which require a minimum of residual dependencies, minimize migration latency, or a compromise of the two. Unfortunately, most of the former research relies on process placement, whereas the latter usually ignores the interprocess communication characteristics of distributed applications. This paper introduces a new metric, dependency cost, as a basis for selection of processes during process migration. Dependency cost is based on process dependencies, which subsume residual dependencies, and the estimated magnitudes of such dependencies.