Load balancing to improve dependability and performance for program objects in distributed real-time co-operation over the Internet

The aim of this project is to improve the fault-tolerant data communication setup that we proposed previously. From the verification tests for this setup, which integrates two basic schemes, we observed that performance could be very sluggish sometimes, due to time constraints imposed by problematic routing among communicating objects and possible message retransmissions. These constraints, if not relaxed, would restrict the possibility of building useful object-based real-time systems over the Internet. The two schemes in the extant setup are namely (a) consecutive message transmissions to improve the communication reliability, and (b) adaptive buffer management to prevent message losses at the reception side due to buffer overflow. Careful analyses of the previous test data have revealed that inclusion of load balancing would make the setup more responsive. With this motivation in mind, a load-balancing model is proposed in this paper. The different experiments in this project involved both local and remote Internet sites. The preliminary test results indicate that the proposed load balancing scheme can indeed enhance system responsiveness by relaxing time constraints. Therefore, further work and deeper investigations in the same direction are worthwhile.