Load Balancing in a Distributed Network Environment - An ACO Inspired Approach

Abstract - The success of nature inspired algorithms, particularly Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) on various optimization and scheduling problems has inspired to apply this approach on load balancing problem. Messor is one such approach based on AntNet which achieved limited success with some unaddressed problems. Extending the Messor's work, in this paper, we propose an ACO based approach to address load balancing problem. In our approach, Swarm Intelligent techniques aid in identifying a suitable node for task transfers from overloaded network nodes to under loaded nodes and ANNs aid in directional decision making process that drives the ant search. The proposed approach is evaluated against Messor with two types of load arrival strategies static and dynamic on different sized networks with 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 nodes and the experimental results show that the proposed approach has resulted in achieving better performance.