Concurrency Control for Mobile Collaborative Applications in Cloud Environments

Abstract

As the world is progressing quickly towards more connected mobile devices, the use of mobile collaborative applications is gaining an increasing popularity. For instance, real-time data streams and web applications (such as social networking and ad-hoc collaboration) are seamlessly incorporated in mobile applications. Despite this powerful evolution, the resource limitation (energy consumption and unstable connectivity) remains a serious problem against a safe concurrency control for an efficient and continuous use of mobile collaboration. In this chapter, we describe the data consistency issues when mobile applications support collaboration through the cloud. Based on human factors (such as high interactivity and data consistency), we present two concurrency control techniques for offloading and ensuring data synchronization among mobile devices and the cloud. The first technique relies on a client-server style to ensure safe coordination, while the second one supports a peer-to-peer mechanism to achieve a decentralized data synchronization.