Combination load balancing for video-on-demand systems

Abstract

We observe that an effect of disk resource sharing 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 combination 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 ..