Accessing Nearby Copies of Replicated Objects in a Distributed Environment

Consider a set of shared objects in a distributed network, where several copies of each object may exist at any given time. To ensure both fast access to the objects as well as e cient utilization of network resources, it is desirable that each access request be satis ed by a copy \close" to the requesting node. Unfortunately, it is not clear how to e ciently achieve this goal in a dynamic, distributed environment in which large numbers of objects are continuously being created, replicated, and destroyed. In this paper, we design a simple randomized algorithm for accessing shared objects that tends to satisfy each access request with a nearby copy. The algorithm is based on a novel mechanism to maintain and distribute information about object locations, and requires only a small amount of additional memory at each node. We analyze our access scheme for a class of cost functions that captures the hierarchical nature of wide-area networks. We show that under the particular cost mod...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: C. Greg Plaxton, Rajmohan Rajaraman, Andréa W. Richa
• Keywords: Access Request, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Shared Objects, Simple Randomized Algorithm, SPAA 1997