JPS6253106B2 - - Google Patents

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates to a method for distributing the load of a plurality of terminal controllers in a system in which a center and a large number of terminals are connected via a plurality of terminal controllers and a public line network.

In insurance business, one terminal is installed in each business office, and collection information, etc. is inputted from the terminal and totaled at the center. In this case, if the system becomes large, two or more terminal controllers and telephone lines are prepared for one center, but conventionally, the terminals handled by each terminal controller are fixedly determined, and each terminal handles the amount of money that should be sent. Since information etc. fluctuate considerably from month to month or day to day, the amount of data sent by the entire group of terminals belonging to a certain terminal controller on a given day is extremely large, resulting in a situation where the line is blocked for a long time.
In other terminal controllers, a load imbalance may occur in which the amount of data transmitted by a group of terminals belonging to the terminal controller is small and lines are idle. For insurance payment data, etc., even if collection starts in the morning, there are many cases in which the collection for the day ends around 3:00 p.m. From this point on, the collection data of each collector is temporarily recorded on the floppy disk. Then, the disk is attached to the terminal device, dialed to call the terminal controller, connect to the terminal, and start transmission.
Load imbalance is a big problem because the load is concentrated in ~2 hours.

The present invention solves such load imbalance by connecting terminals to which each controller should communicate.
The purpose is to solve this problem by making arbitrary changes based on instructions from the CPU. Further, the present invention connects a host CPU and a large number of terminals to a plurality of terminal controllers each connected to a specific line of the exchange via the exchange, and connects each terminal to the terminal controller via the exchange and the specific line. A load distribution method for a system that determines a supplied terminal number and performs communication between a host CPU, a terminal controller, and a terminal.
At a predetermined time when a high load is expected, the number of the terminal with which the terminal controller should communicate is rewritten in the table of the plurality of terminal controllers, and the terminal controller updates the number of the terminal written in the table with the number of the terminal. The configuration is such that communication is performed with the terminal only when information having a matching terminal number is supplied from the specific line, and this will be explained in detail below with reference to the illustrated embodiment.

The drawing is a block diagram of main parts showing one embodiment of the present invention, where TE ₁ , TE ₂ ... TE ₂₀ are terminals installed one at each office, EX is a telephone line switching network, TC ₁ ,
TC ₂ is 2 of multiple terminal controllers
Show one. S is equipped with a host CPU at the center, and M
is a memory that stores various information on each subscriber's account. Each terminal and the terminal controller are connected via the exchange EX, and the lines used are multiple lines, for example three lines. That is, each terminal connects to the terminal controller using one of the lines that is available. In the present invention, the terminal controllers TC ₁ and TC ₂ are provided with a public line connection ID table TBL, into which the host CPU writes the unique number (telephone number) of the terminal handled by the controllers TC ₁ and TC ₂ . This writing can be performed as described below. The terminal controller communicates only with terminals whose numbers are written in the table TBL, and does not communicate with terminals whose numbers are not written. In this example, the table for controller TC ₁
Out of terminals TE ₁ to _{TE 10} , terminal numbers 0001, 0002, 0004 to 0010 are written in TBL, leaving TE ₃ , so terminals TE ₁ , TE ₂ , TE ₄ to _{TE 10} are connected to the controller.
Although it is possible to send data to the host CPU through TC ₁ , terminal TE ₃ cannot utilize controller TC ₁ and instead sends data to the host through TC ₂ , which is the terminal controller instructed to handle this terminal TE ₃ . Send data to CPU. In this way, terminal TE ₃ does not become a load for terminal controller TC ₁ , so the line
The rate at which _L1 becomes busy is reduced.
Moreover, the contents of the table TBL can be arbitrarily rewritten by the host CPU, so in the insurance business of this example, the assignment of terminals to each controller for that day is determined first thing in the morning, and the load on the controllers for that day is reduced. It can be equalized.

In other words, in the insurance business, as mentioned above, the amount of data sent by the office increases on days when collections are concentrated, but this is known in advance on the host CPU side, and today we will send terminals TE ₁ to TE _10. It can be assumed that terminal controller TC ₁ , which handles terminals TE ₁ , has a high probability that the line will be busy, and terminal controller TC ₂ , which handles terminals TE ₁₁ to _{TE 20} , does not _. Processing such as having ₂ take charge is possible. Hosted in table TBL of each controller
The information written by the CPU is this terminal allocation information.
Each terminal temporarily stores the information to be transmitted on a floppy disk (not shown) and then sends it to the center.The capacity of the floppy disk is, for example, 250K bytes, which can store about 5000 items of information. If data is transmitted over a line with a transmission speed of 1.2 Kbytes/second, each terminal will occupy the line for about 30 minutes if the floppy disk is full. Of course, the floppy disk will not be filled to the brim with all terminals, and some terminals may only transmit a small amount of information, but if one terminal controller handles 10 terminals as in this example, it will be possible to collect all the data. This can take several hours or more and can lead to considerable congestion. Therefore, it is extremely effective to distribute the load evenly to the terminal controllers according to the statistics of the current collection status.

Write the terminal unique number to the table TBL of the terminal controller as follows:
The host CPU program, especially the processing program called system generation, controls writing to the terminal controller, and among the terminal controller programs, the initialization program controls the writing processing to the table TBL using commands etc. from the host CPU. This can be done by determining. When loading the initial program of the terminal controller, the terminal controller notifies the host CPU of the start of operation of the terminal controller as a response to polling, etc. from the host CPU, but at this point, the initial setting value is host
The CPU sends table information, and based on that, the terminal controller creates its own table.
It is also possible to write to TBL. Furthermore, in the case of a system in which all programs of the terminal controller are loaded from the host CPU, the changed table information may be included in the program at the time of initial loading.

To input change information, multiple types of table information are stored in advance in a file on the host CPU, and a scheduler (a type of program) selects table information from this file according to the current date, and then inputs the table information to the terminal controller. Alternatively, the operator can adjust, change, or select existing table information, or create and input new information on the spot, for example, from a workstation (input terminal) directly connected to the host CPU. However, when the operator issues an instruction to load the table information to the terminal controller from the input device to the host CPU, the table information created on the spot may be supplied to the terminal controller by a program of the host computer.

Depending on the type of line control unit (LCU), data collection methods include one in which the terminal controller takes the initiative and sucks up terminal data, and another in which the terminal issues a transmission request and causes the terminal controller to receive the data. However, in either case, load distribution control only requires the host CPU to write the responsible terminal number into the table of the terminal controller. In other words, in the former case, the terminal controller simply does not access the terminal TE ₃ that is not written in the table TBL, and in the latter case, even if there is a connection request from the terminal by dialing, If the terminal controller does not have it in its own table, it can reject the communication as not being a target.

As described above, according to the present invention, the terminals handled by one terminal controller can be changed arbitrarily, so that the load on each terminal controller is efficiently distributed, and the efficiency of use of public lines is equalized, resulting in effects. .

[Brief explanation of the drawing]

The drawing is a block diagram showing one embodiment of the present invention. In the figure, TC ₁ and TC ₂ are terminal controllers,
TBL is an ID table for public line connection, EX is a switching network, and TE ₁ to TE ₂₀ are terminals.

Claims (1)

[Claims] 1. A host CPU and a large number of terminals are connected to a plurality of terminal controllers each connected to a specific line of an exchange via an exchange, and each terminal is connected to a terminal via the exchange and the specific line. The host determines the terminal number supplied to the controller.
A load distribution method for a system that performs communication between a CPU, a terminal controller, and a terminal, in which the terminal controller should communicate with the tables of the plurality of terminal controllers at a predetermined time when a high load is expected from the host CPU. The terminal number is rewritten, and the terminal controller communicates with the terminal only when information having a terminal number that matches the terminal number written in the table is supplied from the specific line. load distribution method for terminal controllers.