Review of Replication Techniques for Distributed Systems

Distributed systems primarily provide the access to data intensive computation through a wide range of interfaces. Due to the advances of the systems, the scales and complexity of the system have increased, causing faults are likely bound to happen leading into diverse faults and failure conditions. Therefore, fault tolerance has become a crucial property for distributed system in order to preserve its function correctly and available in the presence of faults. Replication techniques particularly concentrates on two fault tolerance manners; masking the failures on the fly as well as reconfiguring the systems in response. This paper presents a brief reviews on different replication techniques, such as Grid Configuration (GC), Box-Shaped Grid (BSG) and Neighbor Replication on Grid (NRG) by comparing and formalizing its communication costs and availabilities analysis based on k-out-of-n model. Each of these techniques presents their own merits and demerits which form the subject matter of this review.