A Hybrid UDP-TCP (RHUT) Protocol for Data Replication

Data-intensive scientific and engineering applications require both transfers of large amounts of data between storage systems and access to large amounts of data (gigabytes or tera bytes) by many geographically distributed applications. There are already a number of storage systems in use by the grid community, each of which was designed to satisfy specific requirements for storing, transferring and accessing large datasets. Unfortunately, most of these storage systems utilize incompatible and often unpublished protocols for accessing data and therefore use their own client libraries to access data. To overcome these incompatibilities in protocols, different point-to-point, and point-to-multipoint replication architectures based on UDP and/or TCP have been proposed like GridFTP (Allcock, 2003), FPFR (Izmailov et al.), BUDP (He et al., 2002), FTCP (Jin et al., 2004) etc. We have proposed a similar replication scheme called RHUT trying to combine the strengths of these protocols in an optimum way and eliminating their anomalies. This paper presents the architecture of RHUT in detail from an implementation point of view