DRP-DRP: Data Replication Protocol for Disaster Recovery Planning

In this paper, a new data replication protocol for disaster recovery planning (DRP-DRP) is proposed. The primary objective for developing DRP-DRP was to overcome the difficulties associated with the existing data replication protocols, namely synchronous and asynchronous protocols. The asynchronous protocol suffers from high replication latency and inconsistency of the replicated data, whereas the synchronous protocol suffers from high application latency and low throughput of business applications. Furthermore, none of these two approaches considers the criticality of the replicated data or business policy that should be achieved during the replication processes. Agent technology was used as an aid to develop DRP-DRP in order to minimize the required bandwidth cost for data replication and to provide an estimation of the network status. The correctness of the DRP-DRP protocol and algorithms were verified and the performance of the DRP-DRP was evaluated.