BALLS: A structured peer-to-peer system with integrated load balancing

Load balancing is an important problem for structured peer-to-peer systems. We are particularly interested in the consumption of network bandwidth for routing traffic and in the usage of computer resources for object storage. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to simultaneously balance these two types of load. We present a structured peer-to-peer overlay that efficiently performs such simultaneous load balancing. The overlay is constructed by partitioning the nodes of a de Bruijn graph and by allocating the partitions to the peers. Peers balance network bandwidth consumption by repartitioning the nodes. Balancing of computer resources for storage is enabled by dissociating the actual storage location of an object from the location of its search key. The paper presents and analyzes the protocols required to maintain the overlay structure and perform load balancing. We demonstrate their efficiency by simulation. We also compare our proposed overlay network with other approaches. Keywords−structured peer-to-peer systems, load balancing Résumé L’équilibrage de charge est un problème majeur des systèmes pair-à-pair structurés. Nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement à l’utilisation de la bande passante pour le routage de messages et à l’utilisation des ressources informatiques pour le stockage d’objets. Dans cet article, nous présentons un réseau pair-à-pair structuré permettant l’équilibrage efficace et simultané de ces deux types de