A framework for transparent relocation in distributed filesystem using R-TCP

In distributed file systems, a need may arise for relocation of the file system to a different server. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms for ensuring file service availability for the geographically distributed clients. However, migration or replication in many such systems requires that the client or client side daemons take active measures for accessing the alternate servers, thus compromising transparency to an extent. In order to incorporate transparency within the system, we propose using a relocation aware transport protocol as a base on which the distributed filesystem architecture could be constructed. By shifting the responsibility of handling migration / replication from the application layer to the transport layer, it not only simplifies the distributed filesystem design but also helps in reducing the overall turnaround time. This paper describes the design of the Relocation Aware TCP protocol and its seamless integration into the filesystem architecture.