Effective load balancing in distributed video-on-demand multimedia system

Distributed multimedia applications (DMA), such as video-on-demand (VoD) require dynamic quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee from end-user machines for their continuous multimedia streams. The QoS requirements and improvement in job execution time can be achieved with the aid of proper load balancing among the machines. An effective way to achieve load balance is to link up these end-user machines with multiple potential heterogeneous idle or under-loaded clustered-servers and allow these servers with idle retrieval bandwidth to help out end-user machines that are low power or temporarily overloaded (bottleneck). The clustered VoD servers approach provides scalability and availability compared to a single video server. In this paper we design and implement a new clustered-server-client architecture for multimedia VoD applications along with a new REMS+VoD algorithm. Rigorous simulation for the algorithm has been performed by varying both the number of video-requests (sessions) and the number of potential servers. The simulation results show that our approach provides: (1) effective load balancing; (2) scalability; and (3) availability in a VoD system