A concurrency control scheme for mobile transactions in broadcast disk environments

Broadcast disk technique has been often used to disseminate frequently requested data efficiently to a large volume of mobile clients over wireless channels. In broadcast disk environments, a server often broadcasts different data items with differing frequencies to reflect the skewed data access patterns of mobile clients. Previously proposed concurrency control methods for mobile transactions in wireless broadcast environments are focused on the mobile transactions with uniform data access patterns. These protocols perform poorly in broadcast disk environments where the data access patterns of mobile transactions are skewed. In broadcast disk environments, the time length of a broadcast cycle usually becomes large to reflect the skewed data access patterns. This will often cause read-only transactions to access old data items rather than the latest data items. Furthermore, updating mobile transactions will be frequently aborted and restarted in the final validation stage due to the update conflict of the same data items with high access frequencies. This problem will increase the average response time of the update mobile transactions and waste the uplink communication bandwidth. In this paper, we extend the existing FBOCC concurrency control method to efficiently handle mobile transactions with skewed data access patterns in broadcast disk environments. Our method allows read-only transactions to access the more updated data, and reduces the average response time of updating transactions through early aborts and restarts. Our method also reduces the amount of uplink communication bandwidth for the final validation of the update transactions. We present an in-depth experimental analysis of our method by comparing with existing concurrency control protocols. Our performance analysis shows that it significantly decreases the average response time and the amount of uplink bandwidths over existing methods.