Load Balancing of Distributed Actors in an Asynchronous Message Processing Boundary

Abstract

Reactive Systems, especially in the Big Data Era, are undergoing a revolution. The increasing interest is due to their responsiveness, elasticity, resiliency and message-driven trait. In particular, a reactive message-driven system has one core feature asynchronous communication assuring a non-blocking behavior. A particular case of such systems is the use of actors to assure encapsulation and support fast decisions, failure handling and progess. The Actor Model meets the requirements for buiding a highly conccurent, scalable, distributed system, and Akka's tools provide the means to build it. However, to the best of our knowledge the effect of intra-actor asynchronous message processing on the routing strategies and the load balancing issue has not been addressed in the literature yet. The aim of this study is to analyse the behavior of the routers and routees over the existing routing strategies when each routee processes its messages asynchronously. Moreover, we study how the load is balanced among the routees and propose our own routing strategy that can reduce the processing time overhead by considering the complexity of the messages. For that, we build a distributed system to offline process massive trajectories, initially stored in HDFS, with Akka, the Play Framework, and MongoDB. Specifically, we leverage the Geolife projectâArZs GPS trajectory dataset.