Avoiding Infinite Blocking of Mobile Transactions

When a transaction commit decision is lost or delayed in a mobile network, most transaction protocols cannot terminate the transaction and delay conflicting transactions. In contrast to this, we present a concept called Bi-State- Termination (BST) that allows transactions to terminate into two states: one state having the changes applied, and the other state having the transaction aborted. Conflicting transactions that work on these states are not blocked. We prove that BST guarantees atomicity and serializability, and describe a possible implementation using version numbers. Furthermore, our experimental results show that BST is feasibility for mobile networks, and that it enhances the transaction throughput whenever transactions are blocked for a long time.