Multicasting is a cost-efficient method to send one message to members of a group of hosts with only one transmission. This paper suggests that the multicast address may be used in load balancing or load sharing to carry information about the capability of nodes and what capability migrating tasks require. This can make it unnecessary to gather state information about other nodes, which is required by many load sharing or load balancing algorithms. Simulation experiments are ongoing using coloured Petri nets, and prototyping should eventually be attempted, but results are not yet available. However, since possible benefits can be imagined using single-transmission, multicast messages as against probing for or gathering state information, this paper describes the approach with load sharing and load balancing algorithms and lightly touches on other possible applications. (Note that without adequate data, the paper does not include comparisons with existing solutions.)
Keywords: distributed scheduling, distributed systems, load balancing, load distribution, load sharing, multicasting, resource management. Keywords (weakly related): distributed blackboard systems, distributed agents.