Efficient Concurrency Control for Broadcast Environments.pdf

Ecient Concurrency Control for BroadcastEnvironmentsJayavel Shanmugasundaramjai@ Arvind Nithrakashyapnithraka@Rajendran Sivasankaransivasank@ Krithi Ramamrithamkrithi@Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of MassachusettsAmherst, MA 01002AbstractA crucial limitation in environments where data is broadcast to clients is the low bandwidth avail-able for clients to communicate with servers. Advanced applications in such environments do needto read data that is mutually consistent as well as current. However, given the asymmetric com-munication capabilities and the needs of clients in mobile environments, traditional approaches tomeeting these requirements are too restrictive, unnecessary, and impractical. Hence weaker alter-natives that are sucient and practical for such environments are needed. We use a correctnesscriterion that ensures (1) the mutual consistency of data maintained by the server and read byclients, and (2) the currency of data read by clients. With these, clients can obtain data that iscurrent and mutually consistent \o the air, i.e., without contacting the server to, say, obtainlocks. Even though mutual consistency is ensured using a correctness criterion called update con-sistency, which is weaker than serializability, determining the legality of histories with respect toupdate consistency is still NP-Complete. So, APPROX, a polynomial time algorithm to ecientlydetect (a subset of) update consistent histories, is outlined. F-Matrix, a protocol to implement AP-PROX in broadcast disk environments, while ensuring the currency of broadcast data, is proposed.In order for a client to ensure the mutual consistency of data that it uses, F-Matrix broadcastssome control information along with the data. To minimize the resulting overheads, R-Matrix, asimpler version of F-Matrix, is proposed. Experimental results conrm the hypothesis that updateconsistency would lead to substantially lower response times compared to using serializability, asexemplied