A Novel Load Balancing Strategy for Cluster Based Hybrid Video-on-Demand Systems

Video-on-Demand (VoD) has been an active area of research for the past few years in the multimedia research community. Significant research efforts have been directed towards reduction of network bandwidth requirements, improvement of server utilization, and minimization of start-up latency. Server load and network bandwidth are the major performance issues in streaming video over the Internet. Thus, load balancing among servers is one of the major challenges. This paper presents a novel load balancing strategy for cluster based hybrid Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems. The architecture used for load balancing contains peer servers in different levels of hierarchy. The simulation results of the proposed technique illustrates that the load on the servers in a group is balanced up to 90% and the rejection rate is reduced. Keywords— Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems, load balancing, clustering, replication, intra-cluster load balancing, inter-cluster load balancing.