A novel framework for supporting the exponential worldwide adoption of electronic transactions

Electronic transactions have become the mainstream mechanism for performing commerce activities in our daily lives. Aiming at processing them, the most common approach addresses the use of a switch that dispatches transactions to processing machines using the so-called Round-Robin scheduler. Considering this electronic funds transfer (EFT) scenario, we developed a framework model denoted GetLB which comprises not only a new and efficient scheduler, but also a cooperative communication infrastructure for handling heterogeneous and dynamic environments. The GetLB scheduler uses a scheduling heuristic that combines static data from transactions and dynamic information from the processing nodes to overcome the limitations of the Round-Robin based schedulinperiodic interactiong approaches. Scheduling efficiency takes place thanks to the periodic interaction between the switching node and processing machines, enabling local decision making with up-to-date information about the environment. Besides the description of the aforementioned model in detail, this article also presents a prototype evaluation by using both traces and configurations obtained with a real EFT company. The results show improvements in transaction makespan when comparing our approach with the traditional one over homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters.