AbstractQuality of service (QoS) is attracting more and more attention in many areas, including entertainment, emergency services, transaction services, and so on. Therefore, the study of QoS‐aware systems is becoming an important research topic in the area of distributed systems. In terms of load balancing, most of the existing QoS‐related load balancing algorithms focus on Routing Mechanism and Traffic Engineering. However, research on QoS‐aware task scheduling and service migration is very limited. In this paper, we propose a task scheduling algorithm using dynamic QoS properties, and we develop a Genetic Algorithm‐based Services Migration scheme aiming to optimize the performance of our proposed QoS‐aware distributed service‐based system. In order to verify the efficiency of our scheme, we implement a prototype of our algorithm using a P2P‐based JXTA technique, and do an emulation test and a simulation test in order to analyze our proposed solution. We compare our service‐migration‐based algorithm with non‐migration and non‐load‐balancing approaches, and find that our solution is much better than the other two in terms of QoS success rate. Furthermore, in order to provide more solid proofs of our research, we use DEVS to validate our system design. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.