Optimistic concurrency control based on timestamp interval for broadcast environment

Abstract

The broadcast environment has asymmetric communication aspect that is typically much greater communication bandwidth available from server to clients than that of the opposite direction. In addition, mobile computing systems generate mostly read-only transactions from mobile clients for retrieving different types of information such as stock data, traffic information and news updates. Since previous concurrency control protocols, however, do not consider such a particular characteristics, the performance is degraded when previous schemes are applied to the broadcast environment. In this paper, we propose optimistic concurrency control based on timestamp interval for broadcast environment. The following requirements are satisfied by adapting weak consistency that is the most appropriate correctness criterion of read-only transactions: (1) the mutual consistency of data maintained by the server and read by clients (2) the currency of data read by clients. We also adopt the Timestamp Interval protocol to check the weak consistency efficiently. As a result, we improved a performance by reducing unnecessary aborts and restarts of read-only transactions caused when global serializability was adopted. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.