Predictive File Replication on the Data Grids

Most replication methods either monitor the popularity of files or use complicated functions to calculate the overall cost of whether or not a replication decision or a deletion decision should be issued. However, once the replication decision is issued, the popularity of the files is changed and may have already impacted access latency and resource usage. This article proposes a decision-tree-based predictive file replication strategy that forecasts files’ future popularity based on their characteristics on the Grids. The proposed strategy has shown superb performance in terms of mean job time and effective network usage compared with the other two replication strategies, LRU and Economic under OptorSim simulation environment.