Efficient Mobile Client Caching Supporting Transaction Semantics

Abstract

In mobile client-server database systems, caching of frequently accessed data is an important technique that will reduce the contention on the narrow bandwidth wireless channel. As the server in mobile environments may not have any information about the state of its clients' cache(stateless server), using broadcasting approach to transmit the updated data lists to numerous concurrent mobile clients is an attractive approach. In this paper, a caching policy is proposed to maintain cache consistency for mobile computers. The proposed protocol adopts asynchronous(non-periodic) broadcasting as the cache invalidation scheme, and supports transaction semantics in mobile environments. With the asynchronous broadcasting approach, the proposed protocol can improve the throughput by reducing the abortion of transactions with low communication costs. We study the performance of the protocol by means of simulation experiments.