A collaborative fault-tolerant transfer protocol for replicated data in the cloud

This paper proposes a collaborative fault-tolerant transfer protocol for replicated data available on the Cloud and the Grid. This technique utilizes the availability of replicated data on multiple servers to provide fault-tolerant data transfer as well as enhancing download times through the concurrent downloads of the requested data. While this technique provides fast and reliable file transfers, it does not impose extra communication and processing overhead compared to other concurrent or parallel data transfer techniques. The proposed technique allows multiple servers to collaborate in downloading the files, while it does not require run-time coordination among the servers. In addition, there is no need for periodic monitoring to discover server and network failures to achieve faulttolerance. Furthermore, the transfer operation will continue even if all servers except one fail. The proposed technique is most suitable for heterogeneous dynamic environments with varying network conditions and servers' loads. The proposed technique has been implemented and evaluated and the results show considerable performance and reliability gains for data downloading compared to other approaches.