An Efficient Hybrid Replication Protocol for High Available Distributed System

In distributed systems data are replicated and stored at several nodes to increase the availability and overall performance. Here Quorum protocol doffing a certain set of replicas required for read/write operation exists for global concurrency control. One of the representative replication Protocols - the Tree Quorum protocol - has a drawback of rapidly growing number of replicas as the level increases, while the Grid protocol requires the same operation cost even without any failure. In this paper, thus, we propose a new replication protocol called hybrid protocol which capitalizes the merits of the existing protocols and solves the problems of them at the same time. The proposed hybrid protocol has very low operation cost in the absence of failure like the tree quorum protocol, and has relatively lower operation cost and higher availability than existing protocols when failure occurs by employing tree architecture as the overall organization while each level of the tree is organized as a row of a grid architecture. It is thus effective to be applied to survival storage system. We conduct cost and availability analysis of the proposed protocol through mathematical modeling, and response time and throughput are compared with those of the Tree Quorum protocol through computer simulation.