Dynamic file grouping for load balancing in streaming media clustered server systems

A dynamic file grouping strategy is presented to address the load balancing problem in streaming media clustered server systems. This strategy increases the server cluster availability by balancing the workloads among the servers within a cluster. Additionally, it improves the access hit ratio of cached files in delivery servers to alleviate the limitation of I/O bandwidth of storage node. First, the load balancing problem is formulated as a two layers semi-Markov switching state-space control process. This analytic model captures the behaviors of streaming media clustered server systems accurately, and is with constructional flexibility and scalability. Then, a policy iteration based reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed to optimize the file grouping policy online. By utilizing the features of the event-driven policy, the proposed optimization algorithm is adaptive and with less computational cost. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Recommended by Editor Hyun Seok Yang. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant Nos. 60774038, 60574065, National 863 HI-TECH Research & Development Plan of China under grant Nos. 2006AA01Z114, 2008AA01A317, Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province under grant No. 070412063, Graduate Student Innovation Foundation of USTC under grant No. KD2006036, and Science Research Development Foundation of HFUT under grant No. GDBJ2008-045. Qi Jiang received the B.S. degree in Industrial Electrical Automation from Southeast University in 1989 and the Ph.D. degree in Control Science and Engineering from University of Science and Technology of China in 2008. He is currently a Post-doc in USTC. His research interests include optimization and control of stochastic dynamic systems, and performance analysis and optimization of network communication systems. Hong-Sheng Xi received the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from University of Science and Technology of China in 1977. He is currently a Professor in Department of Automation, USTC. His research interests include discrete event dynamic systems, performance analysis and optimization of network communication systems, robust control, and network security. Bao-Qun Yin received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from Sichuan University in 1985, the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from University of Science and Technology of China in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He is currently a Professor in Department of Automation, USTC. His research interests include discrete event dynamic systems, and Markov decision processes.