Adaptive Distributed Database Replication Through Colonies of Pogo Ants

We address the problem of optimizing the distribution of partially replicated databases over a computer network. Replication is used to increase data availability in the presence of site or communication failures and to decrease retrieval costs by local access if possible. We present a new bio-inspired replication management approach which is adaptive, completely decentralized, and based on swarm intelligence. Each node has the autonomy to start at any time, depending on the internal state of its stored data objects, a redistribution process. "Redistribution" means replicate, create, delete, update, or move data objects to other nodes of the network. The redistribution process is a dynamic load-balancing scheme which runs with lower priority in the background. The system is event-driven, but the learning process is not synchronized with the events.