Making distributed transactions resilient to intermittent network connections

Advances in technology enabled new types of networks to appear (e.g. PDA based spontaneous networks). Here, execution of transactions manipulating distributed objects is affected by the intermittent connectivity thereby causing unnecessary aborts. This paper presents a solution to make transactions resilient to intermittent connections thus increasing transaction throughput. This is achieved by i) allowing transactions to further span in time and/or ii) relaxing the consistency properties of transactions. For this purpose, application programmers specify the minimum transaction requirements (which depend on the application semantics) using policies. Evaluation shows that slightly increasing the maximum transaction execution time and/or reducing consistency, transaction throughput increases substantially. This solution is implemented in MobileTrans-a distributed object-oriented middleware system providing adaptive transactions aiding the reliable management of distributed object graphs. Policies are specifically designed to overcome the connectivity intermittence problem. The minimum transaction requirements are specified as parameters to these policies without having to change application code