A scalable solution for balancing the peer load in a chord DHT

Abstract

A critical problem in a distributed system is the load of each of its individual components, which, if too large, threatens the availability of the whole system. A solution for system availability is decentralizing its components by using peer-to-peer networks. For such networks, we define in this work a scalable, transparent strategy for locally balancing the load of the individual peers, based on the intrinsic dynamicity of such networks, thus impacting as little as possible the availability and functionality of the system as a whole. We perform preliminary evaluation for our solution, too, concluding that the overhead added by our load balancing distributed algorithm is small and acceptable, considering the availability advantages it brings with it.

Towards a Highly Available Model for Processing Service Requests Based on Distributed Hash Tables

“…The elements that this novel solution aimed to improve, in order to make the service highly available, are: (1) static or dynamic load balancing, in order to maintain a high availability for the service, even in the context of increased load, due to a larger number of clients; (2) fault tolerance, by proving complete functionality even in the presence of failing nodes; (3) scalability, by DHT self-extension described and evaluated also in [41,42], in order to be able to cover a higher number of clients and the increased needs of persistence, that critical sensitive data have, in order to obtain a generic method for making a previously centralized service to be highly available, with minimum changes at the service level.…”

“…The good dispersion properties of the DHT's hash function will enable an equitable partition of the distributed network service's clients among the Chord peers that offer the service, so that none of the peers will be stressed with too much load. In the current improved approach, in case the load of peers becomes too high, the system should launch a new peer in the overloaded area of the Chord ring, as described in our team's previous work [41,42].…”