An Information Propagation Scheme for an Autonomous Distributed Storage System in iSCSI Environment

We had proposed a distributed storage system which relocates data blocks autonomously among the storage nodes. Generally, owing to requirement of exchanging the management information frequently, such autonomous block migration tends to increase network traffic. Our previous work has presented a scheme to reduce network traffic by appending the management information onto an iSCSI short packet. In this paper, we present a scheme to propagate the management information by utilizing internode communications more aggressively. Our scheme utilizes iSCSI read/write packets which are exchanged more frequently to transmit the management information, and appends also the management information which is collected from the other nodes. This indirect propagation helps to reduce broadcast packets on the network. We have investigated the traffic behavior in the iSCSI environment, and show that our scheme can effectively reduce extra Ethernet frames for exchanging the management information.