On the Design of Distributed Object Placement and Load Balancing Strategies in Large-Scale Networked Multimedia Storage Systems

In a large-scale multimedia storage system (LMSS) 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. Since replica management and load balancing is all the more a crucial issue in multimedia systems, in the literature this problem is handled by centralized servers. Each object storage server (OSS) responses the requests coming from the centralized servers independently and has no communication with other OSSs among the system. In this paper, we design a novel distributed load balancing strategy of LMSS, in which the OSSs can cooperate together to achieve a high performance. Such OSS modeled as an M/M/m system, can replicate the objects to and balance the requests among other servers to achieve an optimal average waiting time (AWT) of the requests in the system. We validate the performance of the system via rigorous simulations with respect to several influencing factors and prove that our proposed strategy is scalable, flexible and efficient for the real-life applications.