A Binary Replication Strategy for Large-scale Mobile Environments

An important challenge to database researchers in mobile computing
environments is to provide a data replication solution that maintains the
consistency and improves the availability of replicated data. This paper
addresses this problem for large scale mobile environments. Our solution
represents a new binary hybrid replication strategy in terms of its components
and approach. The new strategy encompasses two components: replication
architecture to provide a solid infrastructure for improving data availability and a
multi-agent based replication method to propagate recent updates between the
components of the replication architecture in a manner that improves availability
of last updates and achieves the consistency of data. The new strategy is a
hybrid of both pessimistic and optimistic replication approaches in order to exploit
the features of each. These features are supporting higher availability of recent
updates and lower rate of inconsistencies as well as supporting the mobility of
users. To model and analyze the stochastic behavior of the replicated system
using our strategy, the research developed Stochastic Petri net (SPN) model.
Then the Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) is derived from the developed
SPN and the Markov chain theory is used to obtain the steady state probabilities.