Load balancing regenerating codes for multimedia content streaming

In this article, we explore the use of a special type of erasure codes known as Regenerating Codes (RCs), as a way to perform load balancing among servers of a multimedia content streaming site. The goal of our construction is to reduce the costs of keeping the redundant servers by minimizing the amount of information that must be stored on disks as well as main memory. This proposal is advantageous for devices connecting through several means, such as a specialized video streaming device with two different internet connections or a smartphone connecting through Wi-Fi and a carrier simultaneously. To achieve this goal, we use a regenerating code based on a technique introduced by Rashmi et al. known as the Twin Code Framework. The use of this technique allows any user to connect to any k servers containing encoded fragments of the file to decode a particular part of it, while keeping the information overhead at the servers low. The construction also allows new copies to be created when demand increases; copies created at a later stage can be used in conjunction with previously created copies for load balancing purposes. In addition, any node in the system can be repaired with a relatively low amount of transmitted information compared to the length of the stored contents. Our instantiation of the framework uses Network Coding with coefficients drawn from a Hilbert Matrix.