Data allocation and dynamic load balancing for distributed video storage server

In this paper, a novel initial videos allocation scheme and a dynamic load balancing strategy are proposed for a distributed video storage server in o rder to increase the availability and reduce operation cost. The initial al location scheme determines the allocation of video replicas on the servers to achieve static load balance and to obtain a configuration for efficient dynamic load adjustment. From the simulation results, the proposed load shi fting algorithm can reduce up to 50% request fail rate if compared with the same initialization algorithm without load shifting, The proposed initial allocation with load shifting also reduces 25% to 60% request fail rate fro m the least load first initial allocation scheme with load shifting, 5% to 10% request fail rate and 5% to 25% the number of shifting steps from the D ASD dancing method. Moreover, a prototype is implemented on Windows NT to e xamine the correctness and practicability of the proposed schemes. (C) 1999 Academic Press.