On the Performance Potential of Connection Fault-Tolerant Commit Processing in Mobile Environment

Abstract: Mobile inventory, mobile commerce, banking and/or commercial applications are some distinctive examples that increasingly use distributed transactions. It is inevitably harder to design efficient commit protocols, due to some intrinsic mobile environment limitations. A handful of protocols for transaction processing have been offered, but the majority considers only a limited number of communication models. We introduce an improved Connection Fault-Tolerant model and evaluate its performance potential by comparing results in several deferent scenarios, as well as its contribution to the overall mobile transaction commit rate. Our performance analysis, conducted using general-purpose discrete-event simulation programming language, evaluates the effect of (i) ad-hoc communication between mobile hosts and (ii) the employment of an appropriate decision algorithm for mobile host agents. Conjointly, they substantially improve commit rate. In respect of the stochastic nature of random network disconnections, we determine connection timeout values that contribute the most to the highest perceived ad-hoc communication impact.