Load Balancing in Dynamic Networks Robert Elsässer Burkhard Monien Stefan Schamberger Fakultät für Elektrotechnik, Informatik und Mathematik Universität Paderborn Fürstenallee 11, D-33102 Paderborn email: {elsa,bm,schaum}@uni-paderborn.de Abstract Efficient load balancing algorithms are the key to many efficient parallel applications. Until now, research in this area mainly focused on static networks. However, observations show that diffusive algorithms, orig- inally designed for these networks, can also be applied in non static scenarios. In this paper we prove that the general diffusion scheme can be deployed on dynamic networks and show that its convergence rate depends on the average value of the quotient of the second smallest eigenvalue and the maximum vertex degree of the networks occurring during the iterations. In the presented experiments we illustrate that even if communication links of static networks fail with high probability, load can still be balanced quite effi- ciently. Simulating diffusion on ad-hoc networks we demonstrate that diffusive schemes provide a reliable and efficient load balancing strategy also in mobile environments. Keywords: Load balancing, diffusion schemes, dynamic networks, mobile ad-hoc networks This work was partly supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) project SFB-376 and by the IST Program of the EU under contract numbers IST-1999-14186 (ALCOM-FT) and IST-2001-33116 (FLAGS). 1