1 research outputs found
Efficient Management of Short-Lived Data
Motivated by the increasing prominence of loosely-coupled systems, such as
mobile and sensor networks, which are characterised by intermittent
connectivity and volatile data, we study the tagging of data with so-called
expiration times. More specifically, when data are inserted into a database,
they may be tagged with time values indicating when they expire, i.e., when
they are regarded as stale or invalid and thus are no longer considered part of
the database. In a number of applications, expiration times are known and can
be assigned at insertion time. We present data structures and algorithms for
online management of data tagged with expiration times. The algorithms are
based on fully functional, persistent treaps, which are a combination of binary
search trees with respect to a primary attribute and heaps with respect to a
secondary attribute. The primary attribute implements primary keys, and the
secondary attribute stores expiration times in a minimum heap, thus keeping a
priority queue of tuples to expire. A detailed and comprehensive experimental
study demonstrates the well-behavedness and scalability of the approach as well
as its efficiency with respect to a number of competitors.Comment: switched to TimeCenter latex styl