Scalable replica selection based on node service capability for improving data access performance in edge computing environment

The replica strategies in traditional cloud computing often result in excessive resource consumption and long response time. In the edge cloud environment, if the replica node cannot be managed efficiently, it will cause problems such as low user’s access speed and low system fault tolerance. Therefore, this paper proposed replica creation and selection strategy based on the edge cloud architecture. The dynamic replica creation algorithm based on access heat (DRC-AH) and replica selection algorithms based on node service capability (DRS-NSC) were proposed. The DRC-AH uses data block as replication granularity and Grey Markov chain to dynamically adjust the number of replicas. After the replica is created, when client receives the user’s request, the DRS-NSC selects the best replica node to respond to the user. The experiments show that the proposed algorithms have significant advantages in prediction accuracy, user’s request response time, resource utilization, etc., and improve the performance of the system to a certain extent.