Load Distribution Strategies in Cluster-Based Transcoding Servers for Mobile Clients

The recent advance in wireless network technologies has enabled the streaming media service on the mobile devices such as PDAs and cellular phones. Since the wireless network has low bandwidth channels and mobile devices are actually composed of limited hardware specifications, the transcoding technology is needed to adapt streaming media to the given mobile devices. When large scale mobile clients demand the streaming service, load distribution strategies among transcoding servers highly impact on the total number of QoS streams. In this paper, the resource weighted load distribution strategy is proposed for the fair load balancing and the more scalable performance in cluster-based transcoding servers. Our proposed strategy is based on the weight of resources consumed for transcoding to classified client grades and the maximum number of QoS streams actually measured in transcoding servers. The proposed policy is implemented on cluster-based transcoding system. In experiments, we evaluate its fair load distribution and scalable performance according to the increase of transcoding servers.