Checkpoint based multi-version concurrency control mechanism for remote healthcare system

This paper addresses the synchronization aspect for multiple concurrent threads in a Remote Healthcare System (RHS) under development. Resources like data files are shared by multiple stakeholders and users including doctors, trained paramedic staff, patient party or even Government agencies collecting statistical and demographic data. In the system under trial, medical kiosks are setup at distant places where patients visit and their complaints are recorded by trained caregivers. Later, doctor accesses such data from the system, makes a diagnosis and suggests prescriptions accordingly. In such a set-up, it is quite often that more than one users access the same shared resource simultaneously. In conventional lock-based process synchronization, such concurrent processes are blocked by the process holding a lock over the files. The major contribution of this paper is to use checkpoint-based multi-versioning Software Transactional Memory for our application domain to achieve non-blocking process synchronization. With help of multi-versioning technique the proposed method is also able to reduce number of expensive remote validations as well as transactional aborts. Experimental verification finds that proposed method yields higher throughput in comparison to clairvoyant type multi-version concurrency control mechanism.