Mobile data and transaction management

Mobile computing paradigm has emerged due to advances in wireless or cellular networking technology. This rapidly expanding technology poses many challenging research problems in the area of mobile database systems. The mobile users can access information independent of their physical location through wireless connections. However, accessing and manipulating information without restricting users to specific locations complicates data processing activities. There are computing constraints that make mobile database processing different from the wired distributed database computing. In this paper, we survey the fundamental research challenges particular to mobile database computing, review some of the proposed solutions and identify some of the upcoming research challenges. We discuss interesting research areas, which include mobile location data management, transaction processing and broadcast, cache management and replication and query processing. We highlight new upcoming research directions in mobile digital library, mobile data warehousing, mobile workflow and mobile web and e-commerce. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.