Modern web services rely on Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to efficiently deliver contents to end users. In order to minimize the experienced communication cost, it is necessary to send the end user's requests to the nearest servers. However, it is shown that this naive method causes some servers to get overloaded. Similarly, when distributing the requests to avoid overloading, the communication cost increases. This is a well-known trade-off between communication cost and load balancing in CDNs. In this work, by introducing a new meta-heuristic algorithm, we try to optimize this trade-off, that is, to have less-loaded servers at lower experienced communication cost. This trade-off is even better managed when we optimize the way servers update their information of each others' load. The proposed scheme, which is based on Honeybee algorithm, is an implementation of bees algorithm which is known for solving continuous optimization problems. Our proposed version for CDNs is a combination of a request redirecting method and a server information update algorithm. To evaluate the suggested method in a large-scale network, we leveraged our newly developed CDN simulator which takes into account all the important network parameters in the scope of our problem. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme achieves a better trade-off between the communication cost and load balancing in CDNs, compared to previously proposed schemes.
Some other published algorithms like Joint Shortest Queue (JSQ) consider crowdedness of servers as the most critical decision-making parameter of redirecting. In a later work, Control-Law Load Balancing (CLB) algorithm @cite_7 improves JSQ's results. However, it still neglects the communication cost and assumes replica sets are close together.
@cite_7
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Load balancing plays an important role in improving scalability and stability in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to meet the increasing demand on bandwidth. This paper proposed a modified algorithm that takes into account the equilibrium between load balancing and redirection proximity. We extended a fluid queue model which is adopted in the existing literatures to the overall CDN system. In the system, scheduler selects proper replica server for each redistributed request by exploiting load differences between them. Furthermore, through limiting the migration distance for each request, the total costs mainly associated with delay are also effectively optimized. The simulation result indicates that the proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce redirection cost compared to Control-Law Balancing (CLB) algorithm at the expense of a bit of performance sacrifice of queue balancing. Besides, we found that the proposed mechanism has more benefit on queue balancing than CLB algorithm as well, when selecting an appropriate distance threshold.