Global load balancing based on heuristic ant colony algorithm for structured P2P systems

Currently, in the highly dynamic and heterogeneous P2P systems, load balancing, as one of the core issues of performance improvement, faces increasingly serious challenges. In this paper, we make two contributions. Firstly, we propose a load distribution collection algorithm which costs only a little network bandwidth to monitor load distribution effectively. Secondly, we present a load balancing solution based on the heuristic ant colony algorithm. This solution uses the load distribution collected by the above algorithm to generate and update pheromone, designs heuristic function according to the network distance between the nodes and the cost of virtual nodes migration, and achieves load balancing through migrating the virtual nodes. The simulation results show that the solution can effectively enhance system response ratio, and reduce the proportion of load imbalancing and also the overhead of virtual nodes migration.