A Survey of Mobile Transactions Patricia Serrano-Alvarado, Claudia Roncancio, Michel Adiba
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A Survey of Mobile Transactions Patricia Serrano-Alvarado, Claudia Roncancio, Michel Adiba To cite this version: Patricia Serrano-Alvarado, Claudia Roncancio, Michel Adiba. A Survey of Mobile Transactions. Distributed and Parallel Databases, Springer, 2004, 16 (2), pp.193-230. 10.1023/B:DAPD.0000028552.69032.f9. hal-00415604 HAL Id: hal-00415604 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00415604 Submitted on 11 Sep 2009 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. A Survey of Mobile Transactions Patricia Serrano-Alvarado,∗ Claudia Roncancio, Michel Adiba LSR-IMAG Laboratory BP 72, 38402 St. Martin d’H`eres, France e-mail: [email protected] July 31, 2003 Contents 1 Introduction 4 2 Mobile Transaction Context 6 2.1 ArchitecturalContext . ...... 6 2.2 OperationModesofaMobileHost . ...... 8 2.3 ExecutionModels................................. .... 8 2.4 Unsuitability of Classical ACID Techniques . ............ 11 3 Mobile Transaction Proposals 13 3.1 Clustering...................................... 13 3.2 Two-tierreplication . .. .. .. ...... 14 3.3 HiCoMo.......................................... 14 3.4 IOT ............................................ 15 3.5 Pro-motion ...................................... 15 3.6 Reporting ....................................... 16 3.7 Semantics-based ................................. 16 3.8 Prewrite........................................ 17 3.9 KangarooTransactions. ...... 18 3.10MDSTPM......................................... 18 3.11Moflex.......................................... 19 3.12 Pre-serialization. ........ 19 3.13 CommercialProducts . ..... 20 3.14 SummaryandDiscussion . ..... 23 4 Ensuring ACID Properties for Mobile Transactions 25 4.1 Atomicity ....................................... 25 4.1.1 CommitProcess ................................. 25 4.1.2 OtherCommitProtocols. 28 4.1.3 Discussion.................................... 29 4.2 Consistency ..................................... 30 4.2.1 SemanticInformation . 30 4.2.2 Summary ..................................... 32 4.3 Isolation....................................... 32 4.3.1 VisibilityAspects. 32 4.3.2 Concurrency Control Schemes . ..... 33 ∗Supported by the CONACyT scholarship program of the Mexican Government 1 4.3.3 ReplicationIssues .. .. .. .. 35 4.3.4 Other Concurrency Control Approaches . ....... 36 4.3.5 Discussion.................................... 36 4.4 Durability...................................... 37 4.4.1 DurabilityGuarantees . 38 4.4.2 RelatedWorksonLogging. 38 4.4.3 Discussion.................................... 39 5 Movement and Disconnection Management 40 5.1 Movement and Disconnection Issues . ........ 40 5.2 Discussion...................................... 43 6 Conclusions and Research Directions 44 2 Abstract Transaction support is crucial in mobile data management. Specific characteristics of mobile environments (e.g. variable bandwidth, dis- connections, limited resources on mobile hosts) make traditional trans- action management techniques no longer appropriate. Several models for mobile transactions have been proposed but it is difficult to have an overview of all of them. This paper analyzes and compares sev- eral contributions to mobile transactions. The analysis distinguishes two groups of models. The first group includes proposals where trans- actions are completely or partially executed on mobile hosts. In this group we focus on ACID properties support. The second group consid- ers transactions requested by mobile hosts and executed on the wired network. In this case, ACID properties are not compromised and focus is on supporting mobile host movements during transaction execution. Discussions pointing out limitations, interesting solutions and research perspectives complete this paper. Keywords: Mobile transactions, databases, mobility, transaction exe- cution, atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability. 3 1 Introduction The omnipresence of mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), smartcards, sensors and laptops together with the devel- opment of different kinds of networks (local, wireless, ad-hoc, etc) leads to a true mutation in the use, design and development of current and future information systems. Several efforts are devoted to improve data manage- ment in mobile environments and solutions have been proposed in distinct areas [64, 58, 41]. Important topics include: broadcast to deliver informa- tion, caching, location dependent queries and mobile transactions. Research works on these topics attempt to improve support for different types of ap- plications that can be personal or professional ones. For instance, clients accessing public data (e.g. weather forecast, stock exchange, road traffic) or with an inherent mobility (e.g. mobile vendors/clients, health care services, mobile offices, transportation). To manage data correctly, support for traditional properties of transac- tions – atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability – is needed or should be revisited with respect to the specificities of these mobile applications. For that several models have been proposed so far [61, 29, 78, 10, 79, 52, 16, 80, 45]. These works point out the limitations of current transaction technol- ogy for mobile information systems. This paper1 surveys mobile transaction processing works. We consider that this topic is very important and chal- lenging, given the complex aspects of the considered environment. Despite many research efforts [16, 17, 32], the field still lacks a deep comparison of existing works. Our survey attempts to provide a global yet precise view of the current state of the art. As a general framework, we are considering a mobile computing environ- ment consisting of fixed (FH) and mobile hosts (MH) [38] (Fig. 1). Mobile and fixed hosts can be either clients or servers and MHs can be of different natures, from PDAs to personal computers. Here, we make no specific hy- pothesis about the database model (relational, object) and the centralized or distributed nature of the database management system (DBMS). How- ever, we consider that MHs can have storage capabilities and can run DBMS modules. While in motion, a MH can retain its network connections through a wireless interface supported by some FHs that act as Base Stations (BS) – also called MSS. The geographical area covered by a BS is called a cell. Each MH communicates with the BS of the cell it belongs to. The process of entering a new cell is called hand-off or hand-over. Compared to traditional 1This work is an extended version of [74] 4 ones, wireless networks have particular characteristics like low and variable bandwidth. These characteristics and the (generally) expensive transmis- sion cost make bandwidth consumption an important concern. Also, being portable devices, MHs are often limited in screen size, battery power, pro- cessing capability and memory/storage capacities, and moreover, they are exposed to loss and accidents. Communication capabilities between MHs and BSs are asymmetric: BSs do not have power constraints and can take advantage of the high-bandwidth broadcast channels that can exist from BSs to mobile clients in a cell. No direct communication among MHs is sup- posed. It is also important to point out that in wireless networks, bandwidth availability leads to different quality of connections – strong, weak connec- tion. In addition, disconnections must be handled as “normal” situations and not as failures – MHs may disconnect to save battery consumption. Most of these characteristics can impact data management process. For instance, consider an e-shopping application that allows people to browse products in an e-mall, to select, to book and to buy items. We assume that secured e-payment is available based on credit cards or e-money. Application execution – as a set of transactions – will not be the same if transactions are launched from a (fixed) terminal office, from a PDA while traveling in a train or from home using a laptop. Thus, under this context: • transactions may succeed but with different execution times (band- width capacity is highly variable) and communication costs (prices vary among wireless network providers/technologies/time-access); • energy consumption is affected by low bandwidth (more battery is consumed); • transaction failures may occur due to unexpected disconnections or battery breakdown. Informally, a transaction is a set of operations that translate a database from a consistent state into another consistent state. In the context of mobile computing, there may exist several interpretations of mobile transactions, but here, we adopt a general definition: a mobile transaction is a transaction where at least one mobile host is involved. Transaction managers must be designed to support transaction processing while MH changes location and network connections. This affects mobile application performance. As we will see in the following, traditional transaction managers should be adapted to support MTs. Different transaction models (relaxing ACID properties) 5 FH Fixed Host FH