Partitioned Data Management in Mobile Environments

In a mobile computing environment, a user carrying a portable computer can execute a mobile transaction by submitting the operations of the transaction to distributed data servers from different locations. As a result_9f this mobility, the operations of the transaction may be executed at different servers. The distribution of operations implies that the transmission of messages (such as those involved in a two phase commit protocol) may be required among these data servers in order to coordinate the execution of these operations, In this paper, we will address the distribution of operations that update partitioned data in mobile environments. We show that, for operations pertaining to resource allocation, the message overhead (e.g., for a 2PC protocol) introduced by the distribution of operations is undesirable and unnecessary. We introduce a new algorithm, the Reservation Algorithm (RA), that does not necessitate the incurring of message overheads for the commitment of mobile transactions. We address two issues related to the RA algorithm: a termination protocol and a protocol for non-partition commutative operations. We perform a comparison between the proposed RA algorithm and existing solutions that use a 2PC protocol