A novel distributed scheduling algorithm for resource sharing under near-heavy load

This paper introduces SERH - Scheduling by Edge Reversal with Hibernation, a novel distributed algorithm for the scheduling of atomic shared resources in the context of dynamic load reconfiguration. The new algorithm keeps the simplicity and daintiness of the Scheduling by Edge Reversal (SER) distributed algorithm, originally conceived to support the heavy load condition. Both SER and SERH distributed algorithms share the same communication and computational complexities and can also be seen as graph dynamics where the messages exchanged between a processing node and its neighbors are represented as "edge reversal" operations upon directed acyclic graphs representing the target distributed system. Nevertheless, SERH allows such distributed system to deal with the situation of having processing nodes leaving the heavy load behavior and going into a "hibernating" state, and vice versa. It is shown here that SERH has a communication cost approximately 25% lower than the traditional Chandy and Misra's distributed solution, when operating near to heavy load conditions. In order to illustrate the usefulness of SERH in this interesting situation, an application in the distributed control of traffic lights of a road junction is also presented here.