Dynamic load balancing across mirrored multimedia servers

The purpose of this paper is to present protocols for efficient load balancing across replicated multimedia servers in a Metropolitan Area Network. Current multimedia infrastructures, even when they use mirrored servers, do not have standardized load balancing schemes. Existing schemes frequently require participation from the clients in balancing the load across the servers efficiently. We propose two protocols in this paper for fair load balancing without any client-side processing being required. Neither protocol requires any change to the network-level infrastructure. Using network packet loss and packet transmission delay as the chief metrics, we show the effectiveness of the protocols through extensive simulations.