Adaptive Data Replication for Load Sharing in a Sensor Data Center

Cyber-physical applications need to process a lot of sensor data, for example, to analyze traffic patterns and structural soundness of critical infrastructures. Although the amount of sensor data to process is increasing fast, system support to efficiently store and analyze an extensive amount of sensor data largely lags behind. To efficiently store, retrieve, and process massive sensor data, we are developing a sensor data center (SDC) that supports spatio-temporal sensor data structures and parallel sensor data processing using clustered computational nodes composed of commodity hardware. The SDC sharply contrasts to most existing data centers that do not support spatio-temporal sensor data storage, retrieval, and processing. In this paper, we especially focus on the problem of potential load imbalance due to data access skews that adversely affects the timeliness of parallel sensor data processing. Specifically, we present an adaptive data replication method to address access skews in a SDC. In our performance evaluation performed in a preliminary version of a SDC, our adaptive approach substantially outperforms a baseline that does not support adaptive data replication.