Algorithmic Background of the Host Recommendation in the Adaptive Distributed Multimedia Server

Partial support of the Hungarian State Eötvös Scholarship, the Hungarian National Science Fund (Grant No. OTKA 42559 and 42706) and the Mobile Innovation Center, Hungary is gratefully acknowledged.

In a distributed server architecture an obvious question is where to deploy the components. Host recommendation, which gives the answer, faces problems such as server selection, host deployment and, in case of multimedia servers, video replication. It is especially relevant for the Adaptive Distributed Multimedia Server (ADMS) which is dynamically able to add and remove its components to different nodes of the network. The present survey paper introduces the different variants of host recommendation and gives an overview of its possible mathematical approaches. Emphasis is put on the facility location problem and the related approximation algorithms. Finally some algorithms selected for implementation are presented.