MMPacking: A load and storage balancing algorithm for distributed multimedia servers

Abstract

In distributed multimedia servers where client requests for different video streams may have different probabilities, placement of video streams is an important parameter, because it may result in unbalanced requests to the system's stations, and thus to high blocking probabilities of requests. We present a method, MMPacking, to balance traffic load and storage use in a distributed server environment. Since different video streams are requested by clients with different rates, video stream replication is used to balance the traffic patterns of the stations; thus, the requests and I/O usage of the stations is balanced, since replication allows requests for the same video stream to be routed to different stations. MMPacking achieves load balancing by producing at most N - 1 replicas of video streams in a system with N servers. These replicas are distributed among the stations, so that storage balancing is achieved as well, since no station stores more than 2 video streams than any other station in the system.