Adaptive fair resource management with an arbiter for multi-tier computing systems

Recently, there has been an increased reliance on computing systems supported by a multi-tier architecture. In multi-tier computing systems, it is important to appropriately manage resource allocation to ensure fairness of a QoS (quality of service) level avoiding overload conditions in tiers. This paper proposes an adaptive resource management algorithm for multi-tier computing systems in order that all clients have the same QoS level. We introduce a computing architecture which consists of multiple tiers, a group of resource managers, and an arbiter. Each tier is specialized to execute each subtask of clients and hosts virtual machines on its server pool. Each resource manager handles resource allocation of each client and updates the resources by locally exchanging a QoS level of its client with some other resource managers. Then, the resource managers request the resources to the arbiter. The arbiter compensates the requested resources to avoid overload conditions in tiers. Based on the compensation by the arbiter, each resource manager reallocates the resources to the subtasks of its client. We show sufficient conditions for the proposed resource management algorithm to achieve a fair QoS level avoiding overload conditions in all tiers at each time.