Load Balancer Research Group

With the recent advances in wireless networks and the exponential growth in the usage of multimedia applications, multi-core platforms point to be the key of future mobile devices and with it a new paradigm has emerged, which we called into the ICT-eMuCo project: Load Balancer for Mobile Devices.

In general, a load balancer can be seen as a component that spread the work between two or more entities such as: CPUs, clustered computer systems, network links or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization. Load Balancing for mobile devices allows the concurrent and parallel execution of applications and control signals by efficient execution of multiple threads on processors with multiple cores. The load balancer for mobile devices enables:

• effective exploitation of the multi-core hardware platform
• reduction of the power consumption
• scalability
• and the most important from user prospective: assurance of the expected user experience.

Meeting deadlines of real-time transactions and shortening the response time of on-line transactions at the same time is critical in mobile communications as it directly influences the user experience. LoBaMo provides a logical simultaneous processing (concurrency) by priority management and provides physical simultaneous processing (parallelism) by core allocation. The scheduling policies depend not only on the performance metrics gotten from the hardware platform and applications but by the rich amount of information provided by the protocol stack and the predictable interdependency of the protocol stack processes, which mark the difference between a general purposes load balancer and a load balancer for mobile devices.

The load balancer for mobile devices research group came to live into the frame of eMuCo project as a natural answer to the requirements of the system platform of the future convergence mobile devices. It is expected that the output of this research group impact the market trends also in an earlier phase to the implementation of the convergence mobile devices.