On the improvement of the network QoS in a grid environment

Grid systems are highly variable environments, made of a series of independent organizations that share their resources, creating what is known as virtual organization, VO. This variability makes quality of service (QoS) highly desirable, though it is very complex to achieve due to the large scale of interconnected networks. Entities entrusted with the care of the users' interests in a Grid, are known as meta-schedulers or Grid Schedulers [2] [1]. These entities usually take into account the power of computing resources in order to decide which resource will run an user's job, but do not pay attention to the interconnecting network. The provision of network QoS in a Grid environment is the topic of interest of this work, and what we want to do is to develop a meta-scheduler that pays attention to the network when making decisions. This new entity, known as grid network broker, GNB, will be developed at first using a simulation tool. The simulation tool that we have chosen is GridSim [5], because it provides us with a good infrastructure, including an implementation of Differentiated Services [3]. The implementation of differentiated services in GridSim is the Self Clocked Fair Queueing (SCFQ) scheduler [4]. A SCFQ scheduler can provide differentiated service to traffic by changing the weights associated with a certain class of traffic. The higher the weight of a class of traffic is, the better treatment it receives.Our aim is firstly develop our GNB on a simulator and, when our model is tested, we will proceed with its implementation on a real grid environment.