2007.04.10 | Lars Michael Kristensen

The theme of this research is mobile transaction processing systems, focusing on versatile data sharing mechanisms in volatile mobile environments.

The rapid growth of wireless network technologies and portable computingdevices has promoted a new mobile working environment. A mobile environment is different from the traditional distributed environment due to its unique characteristics: the mobility of users or computers, the frequent and unpredictable disconnections of wireless networks, and the resource constraints of mobile computing devices.

On the one hand,the mobile environment promotes a new working model, i.e., people can carry out their work while being on the move.The environment for accessing and processing information is changing rapidly from stationary and location dependent to mobile and location independent. On the other hand, these unique characteristics of the mobile environment pose many challenges to mobile transaction processing systems, especially in terms of long delaying periods, data unavailability and data inconsistency.

Many research proposals that focus on supporting transaction processing in mobile environments have been developed. However, there are still major issues that have not been completely solved. One of the problems is to support the sharing of data among transactions in volatile mobile environments. Our solution is to provide the mobile transaction processing system with flexible and adaptable data sharing mechanisms that can cope with the dynamic changes of the surrounding environmental conditions while ensuring data consistency of the database systems.

The results of our research consist of three important contributions:

- The first contribution is a versatile mobile data sharing mechanism.

- The second contributionis a data conflict awareness mechanism that supports mobile transactions to be aware of conflicts among database operations in mobile environments.

- The third contribution is a mobility control mechanism that supports the mobile transaction processing system to efficiently handle the movement of transactions in mobile environments.

Mads Nygård is professor at the Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway

Host: Lars Michael Kristensen