Load balance optimization of a Red5 cluster in the mobile classroom project

The Mobile Classroom Project aims at building an interactive platform for students. The media platform is an important part of it. Through it, the students can view or download instructional videos. Red5 is a good solution to the media platform. It can support multi-user applications. For this platform, a single Red5 server cannot satisfy the requirement. A Red5 cluster is needed to support a large number of users. However, there are still some defects existing in the traditional Red5 cluster. The most important aspect for our application is the loading unbalance. This problem will lead to the result that some edges of the cluster are in an overloaded state. The clients that connect to these edges cannot get a good service. To solve this problem, we decided to add a load-balancing layer to the system. The layer takes responsibilities to collect information of the servers and choose the suitable server for new requests. In the end of this paper, we will give two experiments. From the results of the experiments, we can see that by adding the load-balance layer those requests can be distributed uniformly and the students who connect to the cluster can get a timely response.