Mi Seon Choi   Young Kuk Kim

Vol. 11,  No. 4, pp. 783-798, Aug.  2004
10.3745/KIPSTD.2004.11.4.783

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An e-business client application in ubiquitous mobile computing environment may become disconnected from the enterprise server due to broken communication connections caused by the limitation of mobile computing environments(limited battery life of the mobile device, low bandwidth communication, incomplete wireless communication infrastructure, etc). It is even possible that mobile client application intentionally operates in disconnected mode to reduce communication cost and the power consumption of the mobile device. We use 'data hoarding' as a means of providing local autonomy to allow transactions to be processed and committed on the mobile host despite of disconnection. The key problem to this approach is the synchronization problem that serialize potentially conflicting updates from disconnected clients on master objects of the server database. In this paper, we present a new transaction synchronizing method that splits a transaction into a set of independent component transactions and give the synchronization priority on each component taking the possibility of use and conflicts in the server into consideration. Synchronization is performed component by component based on synchronization priority. After the preferred component of a mobile transaction succeeds in synchronization with the server, the mobile transaction can pre-commit at server. A pre-committed transaction's updated value is made visible at server before the final commit of the transaction. The synchronization of the component with low synchronization priority can be delayed in adaption to wireless bandwidth and computing resources. As a result, the availability of important data updated by mobile client is increased and it can maximize the utilization of the limited wireless bandwidth and computing resources.