Combination Load Balancing for Video-on-Demand Systems

We observe that an effect of ldquodisk resource sharingrdquo of multi-copy movie traffic has great impact on the blocking performance of a video-on-demand system. This observation leads us to establish a conjecture on how to balance the movie traffic load among ldquocombinationrdquo groups of disks to maximize the level of disk resource sharing. For a given file replication instance, the conjecture predicts in general an effective lower bound on the blocking performance of the system. It motivates the design of a numerical index that measures quantitatively the goodness of disk resource sharing on allocation of multi-copy movie files. It also motivates the design of a greedy file allocation method that decides a good quality heuristic solution for each feasible file replication instance. We further develop analytical formulas to obtain approximate results for the bound fast and accurately. These techniques can be utilized by an optimization program to find near-optimal file assignment solutions for the system computationally efficiently.