AREN: A Popularity Aware Replication Scheme for Cloud Storage

Delivering on-demand web content to end-users in order to carry out strict QoS metrics is not a trivial task for globally distributed network providers. This task becomes still harder when content popularity varies over the time and the SLA definitions have to include both transfer rate and latency metrics. Current worldwide content delivery approaches and datacenter infrastructures rely on cumbersome replication schemes that are agnostic to edge-network resources, and damage content provision. In this work we present AREN, an novel replication scheme for cloud storage on edge networks. AREN relies on a collaborative cache strategy and bandwidth reservation to adapt the replication degree according to strict SLA contracts and content popularity growth. We have evaluated the performances of replication schemes on edge networks using Caju, a content distribution system for edge networks. Compared to a non-collaborative caching, evaluations show that AREN prevents nearly 99.8% of all SLA violations when the storage system is heavily loaded. We also show that AREN provides a sevenfold decrease in the amount of storage usage for replicas, and it increases by roughly 20% the aggregate bandwidth, hence accelerating content delivery.