Scalable service-oriented replication with flexible consistency guarantee in the cloud

Chen, Tao and Bahsoon, Rami and Tawil, Abdel-Rahman H. (2014) Scalable service-oriented replication with flexible consistency guarantee in the cloud. Information Sciences, 264. pp. 349-370. ISSN 0020-0255

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

Replication techniques are widely applied in and for cloud to improve scalability and availability. In such context, the well-understood problem is how to guarantee consistency amongst different replicas and govern the trade-off between consistency and scalability requirements. Such requirements are often related to specific services and can vary considerably in the cloud. However, a major drawback of existing service-oriented replication approaches is that they only allow either restricted consistency or none at all. Consequently, service-oriented systems based on such replication techniques may violate consistency requirements or not scale well. In this paper, we present a Scalable Service Oriented Replication (SSOR) solution, a middleware that is capable of satisfying applications’ consistency requirements when replicating cloud-based services. We introduce new formalism for describing services in service-oriented replication. We propose the notion of consistency regions and relevant service oriented requirements policies, by which trading between consistency and scalability requirements can be handled within regions. We solve the associated sub-problem of atomic broadcasting by introducing a Multi-fixed Sequencers Protocol (MSP), which is a requirements aware variation of the traditional fixed sequencer approach. We also present a Region-based Election Protocol (REP) that elastically balances the workload amongst sequencers. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our approach under different loads, to show that the proposed approach achieves better scalability with more flexible consistency constraints when compared with the state-of-the-art replication technique.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1016/j.ins.2013.11.024
Dates:	Date Event 2014 Published
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Replication Consistency Scalability CloudService orientedDistributed application
Subjects:	CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science
Divisions:	Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment > College of Computing
Depositing User:	Oana-Andreea Dumitrascu
Date Deposited:	29 Jun 2017 13:45
Last Modified:	22 Mar 2023 12:02
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/4760