A Binary Replication Strategy for Large-scale Mobile Environments

• Main Authors: Ashraf Ahmed , Fadelelmoula, P.D.D., Dominic, Azween, Abdullah, Hamidah, Ibrahim
• Format: Citation Index Journal
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://eprints.utp.edu.my/852/1/IJCSS-74.pdf; http://eprints.utp.edu.my/852/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Petronas

An important challenge to database researchers in mobile computing environments is to provide a data replication solution that maintains the consistency and improves the availability of replicated data. This paper addresses this problem for large scale mobile environments. Our solution represents a new binary hybrid replication strategy in terms of its components and approach. The new strategy encompasses two components: replication architecture to provide a solid infrastructure for improving data availability and a multi-agent based replication method to propagate recent updates between the components of the replication architecture in a manner that improves availability of last updates and achieves the consistency of data. The new strategy is a hybrid of both pessimistic and optimistic replication approaches in order to exploit the features of each. These features are supporting higher availability of recent updates and lower rate of inconsistencies as well as supporting the mobility of users. To model and analyze the stochastic behavior of the replicated system using our strategy, the research developed Stochastic Petri net (SPN) model. Then the Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) is derived from the developed SPN and the Markov chain theory is used to obtain the steady state probabilities.