A cross-layer atomic commit protocol implementation for transaction processing in mobile ad-hoc networks

Transaction processing leads to new challenges in mobile ad-hoc networks, which, in comparison to fixed-wired networks, suffer from problems like node disconnection, message loss, and frequently appearing network partitioning. As the atomic commit protocol is that part of transaction processing in which failures can lead to the most serious data blocking, we have developed a robust and failure-tolerant distributed cross-layer atomic commit protocol called CLCP that uses multiple coordinators. In order to reduce the number of both, failures and messages, our protocol makes use of acknowledgement messages for piggybacking information. We have evaluated our protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks by using several mobility models (i.e. Random Waypoint, Manhattan, and Attraction Point), and compared CLCP with other atomic commit protocols, i.e. 2PC and Paxos Commit, each implemented in 3 versions, i.e. without sending message acknowledgements, with a Relay Routing technique, and with Nearest Forward Progress Routing. Special to our simulation environment is the use of the quasi-unit-disc model, which assumes a non-binary message reception probability that captures real-world behavior much better than the classical unit-disc-model, often used in theory. Using the quasi-unit-disc model, our evaluation shows the following results. CLCP and “2PC without acknowledgement messages” have a significantly lower energy consumption than the other protocols, and CLCP is able to commit significantly more distributed transactions than all the other atomic commit protocols for each of the mobility models.