A General Approach to Analyzing Quorum-Based Heterogeneous Dynamic Data Replication Schemes

Choosing a strict quorum-based data replication scheme for a particular application scenario in the decision space spawned by static and dynamic, unstructured and structured, homogeneous and heterogeneous data replication schemes is a crucial decision w.r.t. the resulting quality properties of the distributed system and therefore needs a careful evaluation. To date, the analysis of data replication schemes is limited to only a very specific subclass, namely to homogeneous unstructured schemes: Existing approaches are specifically tailored towards a particular instance of a homogeneous unstructured data replication scheme. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the analytical evaluation of strict quorum-based data replication schemes by means of a compositional GSPN system model. This model allows to evaluate structured and moreover heterogeneous (as well as unstructured and homogeneous) dynamic data replication schemes and also applies for static schemes. Because of being compositional, different data replication schemes can be easily evaluated with the same general system model.