An Improved Multimedia Conference System with Load Balance

Abstract

With the development of economics and the globalization of trade, the Multimedia Conference System is now widely used and the number of its users increases exponentially. But a single server can't handle the high concurrent user requests effectively. In this paper, we improved the Multimedia Conference System with load balance technology. With the load balance technology, the robustness and availability of the system can be enhanced significantly. Keywords-load balance, cluster, Nginx, Multimedia Conference System I. INTRODUCTION With the explosive popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, most popular web sites confronted with a problem that the server overloaded caused by the increasing number of concurrent accesses. In order to process the user requests timely, increase the network throughput and improve the quality of service, it's necessary to upgrade the hardware and software of the sever. But the the hardware is expensive and non-scalability. In this case, server cluster system appears. The sever cluster system refers to a server group which is composed of more than one homogeneous or heterogeneous severs and can provides services that are transparent for the external users. And it becomes a key point that how to achieve a reasonable distribution of load between multiple servers and avoid appearing one server with full load while other servers with little load. In this situation, the load balance technology was born. In recent years, cluster technology and load balance technology got fully developed and they have significant effect on solving the problem of overloading. As a web service, the Multimedia Conference System also has to face the problem that the overload of the server and uneven distribution of resources when there are too many users access the system. Using cluster and load balance technology, the requests the system received can be evenly distributed on each server, thus we can reduce the response time of the requests and improve the resource utilization. The Multimedia Conference System proposed in this paper contains Client Layer, Load Balancer Layer, Server Cluster Layer and Media Server Layer. The Client Layer receives the requests of the user including creating a conference and joining an existing conference. The Load Balancer Layer redirect the user's request to one of the application servers in the cluster according to the load balance algorithm and the different parameters from the Client Layer. The application servers in Server Cluster Layer call the Media Server resources and return them to the Client Layer. This implements a basic process of the system. The Load Balancer Layer contains four modules including User Authentication, Decision-Making, Redirecting and Log Parsing. With the Load Balancer Layer and its load balance algorithm, the user's request can be distributed on different servers and those who want to join the same conference can be allocated to the same application server. Thus we can minimize the response time of the request, improve the resource utilization and also ensure the conference can be held correctly. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: we describe related work in section II. Section III presents the architecture of the Multimedia Conference System. In section IV, we display the implementation of the Load Balancer Layer in detail. Some experiments of key features of load balancer in section V. We conclude in section VI.