Replica selection in the cloud environments using an ant colony algorithm

Cloud computing as a new and popular IT-based technology is a large-scale distributed computing paradigm. Cloud computing is driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand to external customers over the internet. Replica selection requires information about the capabilities and performance characteristics of a storage system. It is based on the user demand and failure occurs during response time. In data cloud, the selection of replica is an important issue for users and to access a data file. Our research is mainly focused on replica selection mechanism in order to achieve the best performance. This research proposes new replica selection base on ant colony optimization to improve average access time. We use Java to evaluate the approach. The obtained result showed better performance of the proposed algorithm.