Dynamic Replication Strategies in Data Grid Systems: a Survey

Abstract

In data grid systems, data replication aims to increase availability, fault tolerance, load balancing and scalability while reducing bandwidth consumption, and job execution time. Several classification schemes for data replication were proposed in the literature, (i) static vs. dynamic, (ii) centralized vs. decentralized, (iii) push vs. pull, and (iv) objective function based. Dynamic data replication is a form of data replication that is performed with respect to the changing conditions of the grid environment. In this paper, we present a survey of recent dynamic data replication strategies. We study and classify these strategies by taking the target data grid architecture as the sole classifier. We discuss the key points of the studied strategies and provide feature comparison of them according to important metrics. Furthermore, the impact of data grid architecture on dynamic replication performance is investigated in a simulation study. Finally, some important issues and open research problems in the area are pointed out.