Intelligent Agent Based Approach for Transaction Processing in Mobile Database Systems

Sekar Ganesh, Mathan Vijayalakshmi, and Arputharaj Kannan

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, India 

Abstract: Transaction processing in a Mobile Database System (MDS) is more complex because of unlimited mobility of the Mobile Unit (MU). The handoff and frequent failure of mobile unit makes it tricky to store log records and access it for recovery. In this paper, we present a new log management scheme, which uses a mobile-agent-based framework to facilitate efficient transaction processing during handoff or MU failure. Instead of executing the transaction in mobile unit, we are giving it to base agent which is in the base station. By doing so, we save power in the mobile unit. Moreover, we are using announcement scheme during handoff which minimizes traffic of Home Location Register Database. Also we use Speculative Locking (SL) protocol, which improves the performance of fixed network transaction by trading extra processing power. In SL, a transaction releases the lock on the data object whenever it produces corresponding after-image during its execution. By accessing both before image and after images, the waiting transaction carries out speculative execution retains one execution based on the termination (commit or abort) mode of the preceding transactions.  We have also compared waiting time of ordinary locking protocol and speculative locking protocol. 

Keywords: Mobile databases, mobile agents, locking protocols.