Idle period notification policy for dynamic task assignment

Performance optimization is an important part of the efficient management of modern information and communication technology based systems such as data communication networks, computing centers or workflow systems. Key factor affecting the performance of a distributed server system is selection of appropriate task assignment policy, because it coordinates the use of processing capacity of servers. In this paper, we propose new dynamic idle period notification policy, in which each server only needs to notify dispatcher of the start of every idle period. We demonstrate by simulation that this policy performs as well as shortest expected delay policy, which requires immediate knowledge of the state of each server at the time of every arrival.