This research project proposes to develop a transaction management technique for a mobile multidatabase management system that takes energy restriction, transaction real-time constraints, and ad-hoc networks into consideration. This technique is aimed at reducing the overall energy consumption and providing a balance in individual mobile host (MH) energy consumption, while at the same time reducing the number of transactions that must be aborted due to deadline violations. It considers both firm real-time and soft real-time transactions, and three modes that an MH can be in: active, doze, and sleep. It treats time as the most important factor in handling firm transactions while energy as the most important factor in handling soft transactions. It uses this principle to locate MHs, schedule transactions, and commit/abort transactions. It handles disconnection and migration by introducing a suspended state into global transactions to ensure that transactions of mobile users whose status is unknown will not be aborted until they obstruct the execution of other transactions. A prototype will be developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique for real-life applications and to provide guidelines to assist both users and designers.
Advances in connectivity and wireless communications have revolutionized the computer industry. Connectivity has enabled software available on independent systems at different locations to cooperate in order to provide a wider spectrum of services to users. Wireless communication technology makes it possible to extend these services to mobile users. However, when both servers and users are mobile, challenges arise due to frequent disconnection, mobility and energy limitation on servers. In such an environment, for servers to deliver real-time database services to users not only correctly, but also efficiently in terms of both time and energy, innovative research is needed to find a way to manage transactions that carry out those services. This project develops novel database transaction management techniques that achieve such goals. The techniques are prototyped, simulated and tested using database requirements from applications of the Fire Department of City of Norman in Oklahoma and the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at the University of Oklahoma as well as from synthetic mobile applications. The project includes international collaboration from University of Augvert-IUT and University of Lyon in France, University of Paderborn in Germany, University of Malaya in Malaysia and Chungju National University in South Korea. It also provides research and education training to graduate and undergraduate students in Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma, two of whom are female.
