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Dynamic load balancing in distributed virtual environments using heat diffusion

Published:14 February 2014Publication History
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Abstract

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) are attracting a lot of attention in recent years, due to the increasing popularity of online gaming and social networks. As the number of concurrent users of a DVE increases, a critical problem is on how the workload among multiple servers can be balanced in order to maintain real-time performance. Although a number of load balancing methods have been proposed, they either try to produce high quality load balancing results and become too slow or emphasize on efficiency and the load balancing results become less effective. In this article, we propose a new approach to address this problem based on heat diffusion. Our work has two main contributions. First, we propose a local and a global load balancing methods for DVEs based on heat diffusion. Second, we investigate two performance factors of the proposed methods, the convergence threshold and the load balancing interval. We have conducted a number of experiments to extensively evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. Our experimental results show that the proposed methods outperform existing methods in that our methods are effective in reducing server overloading while at the same time being efficient.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
      ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 10, Issue 2
      February 2014
      142 pages
      ISSN:1551-6857
      EISSN:1551-6865
      DOI:10.1145/2579228
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2014 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 14 February 2014
      • Accepted: 1 June 2013
      • Revised: 1 November 2012
      • Received: 1 July 2012
      Published in tomm Volume 10, Issue 2

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