Minimizing access costs in replicated distributed systems

Abstract

A new model is proposed for measuring the expected cost of a network operation. The model exhibits monotonicity which means that the cost for site s to communicate with site t must be no greater than the cost for site s to communicate with both site t and some other set of sites. Moreover, by assigning a meaningful cost to all transactions, including unsuccessful one, the cost model allow to minimize the overall network cost independent of data availability. This in contrast to a cost model that minimizes the overall network cost by minimizing data availability.