Dynamic replica placement and selection strategies in data grids— A comprehensive survey

Data replication techniques are used in data grid to reduce makespan, storage consumption, access latency and network bandwidth. Data replication enhances data availability and thereby increases the system reliability. There are two steps involved in data replication, namely, replica placement and replica selection. Replica placement involves identifying the best possible node to duplicate data based on network latency and user request. Replica selection involves selecting the best replica location to access the data for job execution in the data grid. Various replica placement and selection algorithms are available in the literature. These algorithms measure and analyze different parameters such as bandwidth consumption, access cost, scalability, execution time, storage consumption and makespan. In this paper, various replica placement and selection strategies along with their merits and demerits are discussed. This paper also analyses the performance of various strategies with respect to the parameters mentioned above. In particular, this paper focuses on the dynamic replica placement and selection strategies in the data grid environment.