Distributing Network Loads in Tree-based Content Distribution System

Content distribution to a large number of concurrent clients stresses both server and network. While the server limitation can be circumvented by deploying server clusters, the network limitation is far less easy to cope with, due to the difficulty in measuring and balancing network load. In this paper, we use two useful network load metrics, the worst link stress (WLS) and the degree of interference (DOI), and formulate the problem as partitioning the clients into disjoint subsets subject to the server capacity constraint so that the WLS and the DOI are reduced for each session and also well balanced across the sessions. We present a network load-aware partition algorithm, which is practicable and effective in achieving the design goals. Through experiments on PlanetLab, we show that the proposed scheme has the remarkable advantages over existing schemes in reducing and balancing the network load. We expect the algorithm and performance metrics can be easily applied to various Internet applications, such as media streaming, multicast group member selection.