A replica-conscious load balancing strategy for large-scale multimedia storage systems

Abstract

In distributed multimedia storage systems where client requests for different multimedia objects may have different demands, placement and replication of the objects is an important factor, as it may result in an imbalance in server loading across the system. Replica management and load balancing is all the more a crucial issue for large-scale multimedia systems. We design and analyze a heuristic static strategy to determine the placement, number of replicas of the objects, and balance the client requests among the servers, to minimize the average waiting time (AWT) of the requests. Our strategy exploits clever virtual routing technique to strike a balance among the servers for load balancing. We validate the performance via rigorous simulations with respect to several influencing factors and compare with a system that uses hashing function only for load balancing. © 2006 IEEE.