Maintaining mobile transactional consistency in hybrid broadcast environments

Recently there have been attempts in several research areas at efficiently utilizing the resources of mobile computers. Considering the properties in mobile computing environments, push-based data dissemination systems have lately attracted considerable attention. However, skewed access patterns among mobile clients makes response time worse, and they prefer to send data requests to the server explicitly through an uplink channel. A broadcast supporting an uplink channel is called a hybrid broadcast. In this paper, we devise new transaction processing algorithms for hybrid broadcasts. It is assumed that data objects that the server maintains are divided into Push_Data for periodic broadcasting and Pull_Data for on-demand service. That is, clients have to explicitly request data objects in Pull_Data. Maintaining transactional consistency in this environment without much additional cost is our main concern. Finally, we evaluate performance behavior through simulation study.Received: 15 November 2002, Published online: 5 August 2004This work was done as part of the Information & Communication Fundamental Technology Research Program, supported by the Ministry of Information & Communication in the Republic of Korea.