FILE AND WORKLOAD ALLOCATION ON A LOCAL MULTIACCESS COMPUTER NETWORK - INCORPORATING LOCAL PROCESSING AND COMMUNICATION OVERHEAD

The paper presents an analytical model to allocate files and workload simultaneously among heterogeneous servers for a distributed database where the servers are connected by a local multi-access computer netwo rk. The allocation problem is presented in the form of a nonlinear int eger programming model. The model incorporates both focal processing a nd communication overhead. The problem is proved to be NP-complete and thus a heuristic is developed. To illustrate its suitability, the heu ristic is compared with an exhaustive enumeration method for small pro blems and with a genetic algorithm for large problems. Computational r esults demonstrate that the proposed model and heuristic provide effec tive database designs.