A Generic API for Load Balancing in Structured P2P Systems

Real world datasets are known to be highly skewed, often leading to an important load imbalance issue for distributed systems managing them. To address this issue, there exist almost as many load balancing strategies as there are different systems. When designing a scalable distributed system geared towards handling large amounts of information, it is often not so easy to anticipate which kind of strategy will be the most efficient to maintain adequate performance regarding response time, scalability and reliability at any time. Based on this observation, we describe the methodology behind the building of a generic API to implement and experiment any strategy independently from the rest of the code, prior to a definitive choice for instance. We then show how this API is compatible with famous existing systems and their load balancing scheme. We also present results from our own distributed system which targets the continuous storage of events structured according to the Semantic Web standards, further retrieved by interested parties. As such, our system constitutes a typical example of a Big Data environment.