Supporting Distributed Transaction Processing Over Mobile and Heterogeneous Platforms

Abstract

Recent advances in pervasive computing and peer-to-peer computing have opened up vast opportunities for developing collaborative applications. To benefit from these emerging technologies, there is a need for investigating techniques and tools that will allow development and deployment of these applications on mobile and heterogeneous platforms. To meet these challenging tasks, we need to address the typical characteristics of mobile peer-to-peer systems such as frequent disconnections, frequent network partitions, and peer heterogeneity. This research focuses on developing the necessary models, techniques and algorithms that will enable us to build and deploy collaborative applications in the Internet enabled, mobile peer-to-peer environments. This dissertation proposes a multi-state transaction model and develops a quality aware transaction processing framework to incorporate quality of service with transaction processing. It proposes adaptive ACID properties and develops a quality specification language to associate a quality level with transactions. In addition, this research develops a probabilistic concurrency control mechanism and a group based transaction commit protocol for mobile peer-to-peer systems that greatly reduces blockings in transactions and improves the transaction commit ratio. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to systematically support disconnection-tolerant and partition-tolerant transaction processing. This dissertation also develops a scalable directory service called PeerDS to support the above framework. It addresses the scalability and dynamism of the directory service from two aspects: peer-to-peer and push-pull hybrid interfaces. It also addresses peer heterogeneity and develops a new technique for load balancing in the peer-to-peer system. This technique comprises an improved routing algorithm for virtualized P2P overlay networks and a generalized Top-K server selection algorithm for load balancing, which could be optimized based on multiple factors such as proximity and cost. The proposed push-pull hybrid interfaces greatly reduce the overhead of directory servers caused by frequent queries from directory clients. In order to further improve the scalability of the push interface, this dissertation also studies and evaluates different filter indexing schemes through which the interests of each update could be calculated very efficiently. This dissertation was developed in conjunction with the middleware called System on Mobile Devices (SyD).