Analysis and Comparison of Atomic Commit Protocols for Adaptive Usage in Wireless Sensor Networks

Despite many research in the area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in recent years, the programming of sensor nodes is still time-consuming and tedious. One of the new paradigms which seem to be qualified to simplify the programming of sensor networks are service oriented architectures (SOAs). The composition of simple services to more complex ones can be a convenient way to design own applications. However, to enable the sophisticated techniques known from SOAs like replication and migration of services, a transactional model for WSNs is needed. In this paper, we compare the applicability of the standard commit protocol Two Phase Commit (2PC) and the Cross Layer Commit Protocol (CLCP) to our scenario and present our own protocol Two Phase Commit with Caching (2PCwC). We show that the best results in terms of transmitted bytes per commit decision and memory consumption can be achieved if the appropriate protocol is chosen adaptively during runtime.