LoadEFT: Efficient scheduler proposal for electronic funds transfer companies

Nowadays, we can observe that electronic operations generated by debit and credit cards are increasingly common in our daily lives. Each one results in a transaction that must be processed by a service provider company. In this context, this article presents LoadEFT - a new load balancing model for EFT (electronic funds transfer) transactions. It operates at layer 7 of the OSI reference model in order to eliminate the limitations of the traditional techniques for this purpose, known as packet and connection-based load balancing. In addition, LoadEFT was developed to bypass the drawbacks of the Round-Robin scheduling which is efficient only on homogeneous systems. At model viewpoint, LoadEFT presents a scalable framework of components to handle dynamic and heterogeneous processing machines. Its scientific contribution includes a novel scheduling heuristic, which considers both characteristics of the transaction to be processed and data regarding the possible target machines. The tests were performed with real input data from a Brazilian service provider company and showed that LoadEFT overcame aforementioned technical limitations of load balancing of electronic transactions. Moreover, LoadEFT handled transactions without ony loss on both homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters. The same does not occur when employing Round-Robin.