A novel data replication and management protocol for mobile computing systems

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Abawajy, J.H. | Deris, M. Mat | Omar, M.

Affiliations: Deakin University, School of Information Technology, Geelong, VIC, 3217, Australia. E-mail: jemal@deakin.edu.au | Tun Hussein Onn University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology & Multimedia, 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia | University of Malaya, Institute of Science Mathematics, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Abstract: Mobile computing has enabled users to seamlessly access databases even when they are on the move. Mobile computing environments require data management approaches that are able to provide complete and highly available access to shared data at any time from any where. In this paper, we propose a novel replicated data protocol for achieving such goal. The proposed scheme replicates data synchronously over stationary sites based on three dimensional grid structure while objects in mobile sites are asynchronously replicated based on commonly visited sites for each user. This combination allows the proposed protocol to operate with less than full connectivity, to easily adapt to changes in group membership and not require all sites to agree to update data objects at any given time, thus giving the technique flexibility in mobile environments. 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.

Journal: Mobile Information Systems, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 3-19, 2006