Consistent Replica Selection Mechanism for Cloud Data Storage

Abstract

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular and cloud storage services attract more attentions for their high security and availability with a low cost. Cloud storage is expected to become the main force of the future storage market. To achieve high data availability, cloud storage services rely on replication. Data replication is a widely used technology in quorum based data center distributed storage system. In such systems, it is important to choose a closest set of replicas to service a client request for increasing performance and reliability. Static replica selection would be suboptimal even over a dedicated infrastructure. Suboptimal replica choices result in reduced performance as a result of increased response latency. In this paper, a consistent replica selection mechanism is proposed to automatically select number of consistent replicas by searching nearest replicas and selecting consistent replicas depends on current time, nearest arrival time, read/write latency and version for each read request. This mechanism tends to achieve the performance of client requests for cloud services by reducing latency cost.