Dynamic Load Balancing for Efficient Video Streaming Service

Abstract

As cloud and N-Screen services get active, the network traffic of mobile devices is rapidly increasing. The video streaming takes higher bandwidths in the mobile network. So many solutions deploy networks of wide bandwidths and high performance servers for video services. Video has a characteristic of popularity in accordance with the interest of the users. The analysis result of the patterns of users’ approach to the video contents shows that most requests by the users are concentrated on a few popular videos. Servers with popular contents have to manage higher transmission bandwidths in order to handle many users’ requests at a time. But servers with unpopular contents have relatively lower transmission bandwidths although they can handle much more users’ requests. Such imbalance in loads among the servers will cause the lowering of QoS of the video service systems and waste the resources. And as the popularity of the contents changes per time, not allowing a prediction, the loads of the servers will also irregularly change per time. In this study, we implemented an algorithm to solve the imbalance between the loads by placing replicas of popular contents in other servers. And in order to efficiently cope with the severe variation of the popularity of the contents, we implemented dynamic video contents management system which handles the load balancing by checking of the states of the servers in real time. We also verified the performance of the algorithm in many aspects applying real mobile video service workload. As a result, we could reduce the deviation in the transmission bandwidth among existing servers by 57%.