An efficient replicated data access approach for large-scale distributed systems

In data-intensive distributed systems, replication is the most widely used approach to offer high data availability, low bandwidth consumption, increased fault-tolerance and improved scalability of the overall system. Replication-based systems implement replica control protocols that enforce a specified semantics of accessing the data. Also, the performance depends on a host of factors chief of which is the protocol used to maintain consistency among object replica. In this paper, we propose a new low-cost and high data availability protocol for maintaining replicated data on networked distributed computing systems. We show that the proposed approach provides high data availability, low bandwidth consumption, increased fault-tolerance and improved scalability of the overall system as compared to standard replica control protocols.

1. Introduction

Multi-domain heterogeneous distributed computing has matured considerably, but much of the emphasis has primarily been on infrastructural and administrative issues. One of the main problems and the focus of this paper is how to allow distributed users to safely access the same information from many different sites simultaneously in heterogeneous distributed computing systems such as clusters and grid computing. The solution to this problem is very important as scores of database management systems across the Internet access and maintains large amounts of data for e-commerce on-line trading, banking, digital libraries, and other high-volume sites. Also, experimental analysis in data grid systems involves collaborations of many researchers from different locations [13], [15].