A probability-based approach of transaction consistency in mobile environments

In mobile distributed databases, the communications between sites only provide weak connectivity. To improve the efficiency of transaction processing in mobile computers, lazy replication is used extensively. But this approach either doesn't guarantee serializability and consistency as needed by applications or imposes restrictions on placement of data and which data objects can be updated. The shortcomings make it difficult for lazy replication to be adaptive to the dynamic changes of network connection and configuration in mobile environments. In the paper, we propose a probability-based approach, which guarantees serializability and consistency. We adopt the quality of service specification and achieve transaction consistency dynamically through the collaboration between applications and systems. Probability-based approach is flexible and adaptive to mobile computing environments. The experimental results suggest that probability-based approach outperform ordinary lazy replication.