Markov teams-An analytical approach to process migration in distributed computing systems

A process migration mechanism offers a means to exploit the performance reserves present in networks of workstations used as personal computers by allowing the processors to migrate processes from overload ones to underused ones. Several distributed operating systems provide such a facility, the benefits of its use depending on the specification of a proper process migration policy. This work proposes an analytical model, the Markov Team Model, to assist the design of such a policy. Besides deriving this model from results of classical Team Theory and Markov Decision Processes, the paper studies the special case of homogeneous distributed computing systems and present methods for parameter estimation. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the benefits of using this model.