Broadcast transaction scheduling in mobile computing environments

Abstract

Most of the recent studies on broadcast based data dissemination approach have an implicit assumption that the server is able to broadcast consistent data to the mobile clients. However, this assumption may not be valid unless there is a special algorithm to handle broadcasting data in a consistent and timely manner. In this work, we address a number of issues related to this problem. An efficient algorithm called the read-write set test is adopted to read the entire database, which causes little interference with the update transactions at the server. For broadcast transaction scheduling, an algorithm based on a mixed strategy is proposed to handle the case of flat broadcast disks. Using these two algorithms together with some fine tuning, the objectives of reading entire database consistently with minimum impact to the system, broadcasting fresh data, and meeting the periodicity requirement can be met.