A Read-Write-Validate approach to optimistic concurrency control for energy efficiency of resource-constrained systems

Modern smartphones feature multiple applications which access shared data on the solid state storage within the device. As applications become more complex, contention over this memory resource is becoming an issue. This leads to increased battery drain as the applications are forced to touch the solid state device repeatedly after failing to retrieve or store data due to contention from other applications. We describe an optimistic concurrency control algorithm, combining a novel Read-Write-Validate phase sequence with virtual execution. The protocol is suitable for governing transactions operating on databases residing on resource-constrained devices. Increasing energy efficiency and reducing latency are primary goals for our algorithm. We show that this is achieved by reducing persistent store access, and satisfy real-time requirements via transaction scheduling that affords greater determinism.