Optimistic scheduling for transaction management in mobile database systems

In a mobile computing environment, in which communication channels are limited and have low-bandwidths, mobile transactions are long-lived and frequently disconnected with their wireless network in processing. Such peculiarities of mobile transactions make existing transaction scheduling schemes inadequate and raise new challenging research problems. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling scheme called OTS/MT (Optimistic Timestamp Scheme for Mobile Transactions) for mobile transaction scheduling. OTS/MT is based on an optimistic approach that is suitable for low data contention, and prevents indefinite postponement and cascading delay which are major drawbacks of the existing optimistic concurrency control scheme and the timestamp ordering scheme. In addition, the OTS/MT algorithm is inherently a deadlock-free scheduling scheme. In order to schedule mobile transactions, OTS/MT postpones the detection of conflict between mobile transactions until transaction commit time to improve the performance deterioration of TO. In this paper, we attempt to show that this application of optimism to TO is justified by way of simulation.