An energy-efficient mobile transaction processing method using random back-off in wireless broadcast environments

Broadcast is widely accepted as an efficient technique for disseminating data to a large number of mobile clients over a single or multiple channels. Due to the limited uplink bandwidth from mobile clients to server, conventional concurrency control methods cannot be directly applied. There has been many researches on concurrency control methods for wireless broadcast environments. However, they are mostly for read-only transactions or do not consider exploiting cache. They also suffer from the repetitive aborts and restarts of mobile transactions when the access patterns of mobile transactions are skewed. In this paper, we propose a new optimistic concurrency control method suitable for mobile broadcast environments. To prevent the repetitive aborts and restarts of mobile transactions, we propose a random back-off technique. To exploit the cache on mobile clients, our method keeps the read data set of mobile transactions and prefetches those data items when the mobile transactions are restarted. As other existing optimistic concurrency control methods for mobile broadcast environments does, it works for both read-only and update transactions. Read-only transactions are validated and locally committed without using any uplink bandwidth. Update transactions are validated with forward and backward validation, and committed after final validation consuming a small amount of uplink bandwidth. Our performance analysis shows that it significantly decreases uplink and downlink bandwidth usage compared to other existing methods. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.