2 research outputs found
Supporting disconnected operations in mobile computing
Mobile computing has enabled users to seamlessly access databases even when they are on the move. However, in the absence of readily available high-quality communication, users are often forced to operate disconnected from the network. As a result, software applications have to be redesigned to take advantage of this environment while accommodating the new challenges posed by mobility. In particular, there is a need for replication and synchronization services in order to guarantee availability of data and functionality, (including updates) in disconnected mode. To this end we propose a scalable and highly available data replication and management service. The proposed replication technique is compared with a baseline replication technique and shown to exhibit high availability, fault tolerance and minimal access times of the data and services, which are very important in an environment with low-quality communication links.<br /
Contention management for distributed data replication
PhD ThesisOptimistic replication schemes provide distributed applications with access
to shared data at lower latencies and greater availability. This is
achieved by allowing clients to replicate shared data and execute actions
locally. A consequence of this scheme raises issues regarding shared data
consistency. Sometimes an action executed by a client may result in
shared data that may conflict and, as a consequence, may conflict with
subsequent actions that are caused by the conflicting action. This requires
a client to rollback to the action that caused the conflicting data,
and to execute some exception handling. This can be achieved by relying
on the application layer to either ignore or handle shared data inconsistencies
when they are discovered during the reconciliation phase of an
optimistic protocol.
Inconsistency of shared data has an impact on the causality relationship
across client actions. In protocol design, it is desirable to preserve the
property of causality between different actions occurring across a distributed
application. Without application level knowledge, we assume
an action causes all the subsequent actions at the same client. With
application knowledge, we can significantly ease the protocol burden of
provisioning causal ordering, as we can identify which actions do not
cause other actions (even if they precede them). This, in turn, makes
possible the client’s ability to rollback to past actions and to change
them, without having to alter subsequent actions. Unfortunately, increased
instances of application level causal relations between actions
lead to a significant overhead in protocol. Therefore, minimizing the
rollback associated with conflicting actions, while preserving causality,
is seen as desirable for lower exception handling in the application layer.
In this thesis, we present a framework that utilizes causality to create
a scheduler that can inform a contention management scheme to reduce
the rollback associated with the conflicting access of shared data.
Our framework uses a backoff contention management scheme to provide
causality preserving for those optimistic replication systems with high
causality requirements, without the need for application layer knowledge.
We present experiments which demonstrate that our framework reduces
clients’ rollback and, more importantly, that the overall throughput of
the system is improved when the contention management is used with
applications that require causality to be preserved across all actions