A fair load balancing algorithm for hypercube-based DHT networks

Abstract

Load balance is an important problem in the DHT-based P2P networks. In recent years, many solutions have been proposed to address this problem. However, these solutions have some limitations in our opinion. They either make some unrealistic assumptions about the network, or have high communication or maintenance overhead. In this paper, we present a distributed load balancing algorithm for the hypercube-based DHT networks. Our algorithm is based on the concept of fairness and uses the fairness index as the fairness metric. The purpose of our algorithm is to distribute the query load fairly to nodes. Each node periodically monitors the fairness index of current load distribution by using only local computation and it tries to achieve a fairer load distribution by dynamically adjusting its indegree according to its experienced load and the fairness index. The results of our experiments show that our algorithm has low overhead and it can achieve good load balance without unrealistic assumptions about the network. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.