A dynamic policy of segment replication for load-balancing in video-on-demand servers

In a video-on-demand server, resource reservation is needed for continuous delivery. Hence, any given server can serve only a fixed maximum of clients. Different videos can be placed on different disks or disk array groups. Since the access rates to various movies are not uniform, load imbalance can occur among the disks in the system. In this paper, we propose a dynamic policy that replicates segments of files to balance the load across the disks. By using simulation, we show that the proposed policy is responsive to quick load surges and is superior to a policy based on the static replication of hot movies.