A lazy commit protocol for mobile transactions

With an increasing use of mobile and hand-held computing devices, there is a need for new algorithms for data and transaction management in mobile environments. Devices are becoming more and more computationally capable and in many cases power is no more a critical issue: for example, laptops, which can be charged time to time. The reliability of communication links is also not of concern. The bottleneck in many of these situations is turning out to be the communication bandwidth. In this work we present a mobile transaction management protocol, which employs a lazy commit strategy to minimize the bandwidth utilization and the frequency of communication. We defer the commit and lock release until some other device requests a conflicting lock or the user explicitly asks the system to commit the changes. This reduces the communication frequency and also the bandwidth usage. Simulation results show that, in terms of bandwidth usage, our protocol performs strictly better than an existing optimistic protocol for mobile transactions.