A Cost-Effective and Multi-Source-Aware Replica Migration Approach for Geo-Distributed Data Centers

Abstract

Geographically distributed data centers have been de-ployed for different purposes, such as minimizing the transmission and response time and the amount of data exchanges throughout the networks. Beyond fault tolerance purposes, data replication has been a popular solution to increase data availability by bringing data closer to the end users. Most existing studies migrate replicas to the desired destinations from a single source, and few of such solutions are cost-aware. By having a multi-source and cost-aware approach, we can accelerate the transmission time resulting in a better quality of service for the end users. Towards that end, this paper introduces a cost-effective and deadline-aware replica migration approach for geo-distributed data centers. The proposed model discovers the appropriate source(s) and paths to transmit the replicas to a desired destination cost-effectively. This problem, which jointly considers cost and deadline, is formulated into a mixed-integer linear programming optimization model. Extensive evaluation against two of the most recent approaches shows significant improvement in meeting the deadlines and reducing the cost incurred to the customers.