Load balancing for clusters of VOD servers

In a VOD system with clustering servers, how to support more clients and reduce the average response time of requests is a critical topic. In the paper, we focus on dynamic load balancing among the servers to reach these goals. The load balancing among the servers can be achieved if a load balancing mechanism is triggered to perform file migration and request migration when a load unbalance is detected. Besides we also integrate an admission control mechanism within the system to guarantee video streams displayed continuously at a given rate, and even use an initialization algorithm to allocate video objects to the servers in advance according to their popularity and the capabilities of the servers. Through the simulation model, we found that our algorithms have better load balancing, higher accepted rate and faster response time of requests. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.