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.