Supporting read-only transactions in wireless broadcasting

Wireless communications support a new form of data delivery in which servers broadcast data to a number of clients that listen to the broadcast channel and retrieve data of interest as they arrive on the channel. We address the problem of ensuring the consistency and currency of read-only transactions when the values of broadcast data change. We identify a set of criteria that methods for ensuring consistency in wireless mobile computing must satisfy. We then present a number of such methods and evaluate the degree at which they fulfill the criteria set. Consistency is ensured without contacting the server