On the Effectiveness of Migration-based Load Balancing Strategies in DHT Systems

As a fundamental problem in DHT-based P2P systems, load balancing is important to avoid performance degradation and guarantee system fairness. In this paper, to get a better understanding about the effectiveness of migration-based load balancing approaches in DHT systems, we analytically study two representative migration-based load balancing strategies: rendezvous directory strategy (RDS) and independent searching strategy (ISS). They differ in load information management and decision making in the process of load balancing. We analyze their performance in terms of efficiency, scalability and robustness, and explore the impact of their parameter settings. Based on the analysis results, we also propose a gossip-based strategy (GBS) for load balancing in DHT systems, which attempts to achieve the benefits of both RDS and ISS. Later, the effectiveness of GBS is evaluated by simulation under different workload and churn.