GMTC: A Generalized Commit Approach for Hybrid Mobile Environments

Mobile environments increasingly require distributed atomic transactions to support the growing diversity of financial, gaming, social networking and many other applications. The underlying mobile infrastructure is correspondingly evolving with increasingly diverse wired and wireless elements and also with increasing exposure to a variety of operational perturbations at the mobile elements and communication levels. Consequently, the challenge is not only in providing efficient nonblocking mobile commit (as a fundamental basis behind consistent mobile transactions) but to also provide efficient perturbation-resilient atomic commit in the heterogeneous mobile space. The contribution of this paper is in developing a perturbation-resilient mobile commit protocol that efficiently provides for and preserves strict atomicity for transactional applications. The protocol does not necessarily require access to the powerful communication/computation elements of the wired infrastructure during transaction execution. However, in case access to a wired network becomes possible, it then adapts to utilize this to 1) increase the resilience to network perturbations achieving higher commit rates, and 2) reduce the wireless message overhead and the blocking of transaction participants leading to higher transactions throughput. In contrast, existing solutions are often tailored either for 1) infrastructure-based mobile environments, or 2) infrastructure-less ad hoc networks. To our knowledge, there is no existing commit protocol that can adapt across diverse infrastructure communication modes. The proposed perturbation-resilient generalized mobile transaction commit (GMTC) protocol represents the first atomic commit protocol for hybrid mobile environments which 1) takes advantage of accessing infrastructures, by choosing reliable infrastructure nodes for coordination of transactions and for replication of commit data of mobile participants to tolerate network disconnections, and 2) tolerates network partitioning and delivers best-effort resultsâin terms of transaction commit rate, message complexity, and commit/abort decision time (latency)âif the access to wired infrastructure is unavailable. The protocol performance simulations (covering transaction commit rate, message complexity, and commit/abort decision time) demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed protocol in generalized mobile environments.