A path selection-based algorithm for real-time data staging in Grid applications

Efficient data scheduling is becoming an important issue in distributed real-time applications that produce huge data sets. The Grid environment on which these applications may run seeks to harness the geographically distributed resources for the applications. Scheduling components should account for real-time measures of the applications and reduce communication overhead due to enormous data size experienced, especially in dissemination applications. In this study, we consider the data staging scheme to provide the dissemination of large-scale data sets for the distributed real-time applications. We propose a new path selection-based algorithm for optimizing a criterion that reflects the general satisfiability of the system. The algorithm adopts a blocking-time analysis method combined with a simple heuristic to explore the most likely regions of a search space. Two heuristics are provided for the algorithm to explore these regions of the search space. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm together with either of the heuristic has higher performance compared to other algorithms in the literature. We also show by simulation that a new optimization criterion we proposed in this study is successful in improving the performance of the individual applications.