Dynamic load balancing and content, update for media storage servers

Effective management of multiple media servers integrated to deliver real-time multimedia content to users for video-on-demand (VoD) applications is examined in this research. We propose a random early migration (REM) scheme to reduce the service rejection rate, to balance the load of media servers and to reduce the service delay. When a new request is dispatched to a media server, REM compares the current service load with preset thresholds and decides whether request migration is needed with a certain probability, which is a function of the service load. To control the video access rate, we apply a time window to predict the video access probability in the near future and dynamically update the video content in media servers. Simulation results demonstrate that REM alone and/or REM with dynamic content update can achieve an enhanced system performance.