A Deadlock and Livelock Free Protocol for Decentralized Internet Resource Coallocation

Abstract

Computing over the Internet is becoming increasingly popular. With the emerging infrastructures such as computational grids and Web services, it is possible to develop applications that support various Internet-wide collaborations through seamlessly harnessing appropriate Internet resources. Yet, as Internet computing is becoming pervasive, it also presents a number of new challenges in designing efficient resource allocation protocol that provides clear directives on the acquisition of shared resources. In particular, the problem of coallocating distributed Internet resources that span multiple administrative domains is complicated by 1) the need for scalability, 2) the availability of alternative co-allocation schemes, 3) the possibility of deadlock and livelock, and finally 4) the lack of means for changing information between the independent Internet applications. Motivated by this, this paper develops a new scalable protocol for fast coallocation of Internet resources. The proposed protocol is free from deadlock and livelock, and seeks to effectively exploit the available alternative resource coallocation schemes through parallelization of requests for required resources. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed protocol yields a significant performance improvement over the existing deadlock prevention protocol.