Transaction Processing in a Mobile, Multi-Database Environment

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications 2001-11, Vol.15 (2), p.161
• Main Authors: Lim, Jb, Hurson, Ar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Concurrency control; Control algorithms
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1011646626868

Issue Title: Special Issue: Multimedia Systems, Mobile Computing and Global Information Sharing Current distributed and multi-database systems are designed to allow timely and reliable access to large amounts of data distributed at different locations. Changes in current technology now allow users to access this data via a wide variety of devices through a diverse communication medium. A mobile data access system is an environment in which a wireless-mobile computing environment is superimposed upon a multi-database environment in order to realize "anywhere, anytime" access capability. As a potentially large number of users may siultaneously access the available data, there are several issues involved in the ability to concurrently manage transactions. Current multi-database concurrency control schemes do not efficiently manage these accesses because they do not address the limited bandwidth and frequent disconnections associated with wirelessnetworks. This paper first introduces the so-called mobile data access system (MDAS) and then proposes a new hierarchical concurrency control algorithm. The proposed concurrency control algorithm, v-lock, uses global locking tables created with semantic information contained within the hierarchy. The locking tables are subsequently used to serialize global transactions, and detect and remove global deadlocks. The performance of the new algorithm is simulated and the results are presented. In addition (through simulation) the performance of the proposed algorithm has been compared and contrasted against the site graph method, the potential conflict graph method, and the forced conflict method[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]