Efficient dissemination of transaction-consistent data in broadcast environments

In this paper, we present a novel protocol for disseminating data in broadcast environments such that view consistency, a useful correctness criterion for broadcast environments, is guaranteed. Our protocol is based on concurrency control information that is constructed by the server and is broadcasted at the beginning of each broadcast cycle. The concurrency control information mainly captures read-from relations among update transactions. A salient feature of the protocol is that the concurrency control information is small in size, but precise enough for reducing unnecessary abortion of mobile transactions. The small-sized concurrency control information implies low communication overhead on broadcasting system. In addition, the computation overheads imposed by the algorithm on the server and the clients are low. We also address the reliability issue of wireless communication and the incorporation of a prefetching mechanism into our protocol. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our protocol in comparison with existing methods. Furthermore, we have extended our protocol to deal with local view consistency which requires that all mobile transactions submitted by the same client observe the same serial order of update transactions.