On the design of perturbation-resilient atomic commit protocols for mobile transactions

Abstract

Distributed mobile transactions utilize commit protocols to achieve atomicity and consistent decisions. This is challenging as mobile environments are typically characterized by frequent perturbations such as network disconnections and node failures. On one hand environmental constraints on mobile participants and wireless links may increase the resource blocking time of fixed participants. On the other hand frequent node and link failures complicate the design of atomic commit protocols by increasing both the transaction abort rate and resource blocking time. Hence, the deployment of classical commit protocols (such as two-phase commit) does not reasonably extend to distributed infrastructure-based mobile environments driving the need for perturbation-resilient commit protocols.In this paper, we comprehensively consider and classify the perturbations of the wireless infrastructure-based mobile environment according to their impact on the outcome of commit protocols and on the resource blocking times. For each identified perturbation class a commit solution is provided. Consolidating these sub-solutions, we develop a family of fault-tolerant atomic commit protocols that are tunable to meet the desired perturbation needs and provide minimized resource blocking times and optimized transaction commit rates. The framework is also evaluated using simulations and an actual testbed deployment.

DiTON: Towards facilitating distributed transactions in opportunistic networks

“…Extant schemes for transactions in MANETs are unsuitable to ONs [12]. While existing schemes have the ability to recover from node faults and link faults [12] [13] , loss of connectivity among nodes (e.g., a partitioned network) is treated as a failure [5].…”

“…While existing schemes have the ability to recover from node faults and link faults [12] [13] , loss of connectivity among nodes (e.g., a partitioned network) is treated as a failure [5]. In ONs, lack of end-to-end connectivity is expected behavior and thus the challenges of Category 4 become more significant.…”

Untitled

“…To minimize the adverse effects of this overhead on the overall system performance, there is a continuing interest in developing more efficient ACPs and optimizations, albeit for different distributed database system environments with inherently different characteristics. These include main memory databases (e.g., [5]), mobile and ad hoc networks (e.g., [6,7,8] ), real-time databases (e.g., [9,10,11]) and component-based architectures (e.g., [12]); besides traditional distributed database systems (e.g., [3,13]).…”

On the Performance Potential of Connection Fault-Tolerant Commit Processing in Mobile Environment

“…The Two-Phase Commit (2PC) protocol [7] that allows the involved parties to agree on a common decision to commit or abort the transaction even in the presence of failures is the most commonly used protocol for fixed networks but is unsuitable for mobile environments [8]. A handful of protocols for transaction execution in distributed mobile environment have been offered [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], but the majority considers only a limited number of communication models.…”

“…The main contribution of this paper is a simulation-based performance analysis of an amended Connection Fault-Tolerant (CFT) model for mobile distributed transaction processing, designed to show resilience to connection failures of mobile devices and initially introduced as a conceptual model in [20]. It differs from other infrastructure based protocols [9][10][11], [13], in the fact that, besides the standard communication between MHs and the fixed network, it (i) supports ad-hoc communication between MHs and (ii) introduces a decision algorithm that is responsible for decision making on behalf of a mobile host in a special case, when neither standard, nor ad-hoc communication is possible. We evaluate the performance potential of the CFT model by comparing the results in several deferent scenarios, as well as its contribution to the overall mobile transaction commit rate.…”