A DBMS for Mobile Transactions Using Bi-State-Termination

Whenever distributed transaction processing in MANETs or other unreliable networks has to guaranteeatomicity and isolation, a major challenge is how long-term blocking of resources can be avoided in casethe mobile device looses connection to other participants of the transaction. We present a new techniquefor treating blocked data of transaction participants that wait for a coordinator’s commit decision. Ourtechnique, Bi-State-Termination (BST), gives participants that have moved during transaction execution thepossibility to continue transaction processing before they know the coordinator’s decision on transactioncommit. The key idea of our technique is to consider both possible outcomes (commit and abort) of unknowntransaction decisions. Within this paper, we describe a fast implementation of the fundamental relationaldatabase operations for a DBMS supporting the BST transaction synchronization protocol that avoids longtermtransaction blocking.