Mobile agents for distributed transactions of a distributed heterogeneous database system

Abstract

A Distributed Heterogeneous Database System (DHDBS) is constituted of different kinds of autonomous databases connected to the network. A distributed transaction in such a system involves many subtransactions and data movements among database sites. For the time being, most of the commercial database products implement their distributed transactions using the traditional client/server model that is suffering from enormous data movements. This paper proposes a new distributed transaction model which uses mobile agent technology to reduce data traffics in distributed transactions. The idea is backed by the well-known characteristics, such as mobility, autonomy, and concurrency, of mobile agents in supporting distributed computations. The aim is to boost the performance of distributed transactions of a heterogeneous database system in a loosely coupled environment (such as the Internet). An procedure is designed for distributed query decomposition. Some principles are observed for the path planning of a mobile agent roaming the network to carry out various sub-transactions. © 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.