Transactional Agents for Pervasive Computing

Pervasive computing enables seamless integration of computing technology into everyday life to make up-to-date information and services proactively available to the users based on their needs and behaviors. We aim to develop a transaction management scheme as a pertinent component for such environment supported by either structured or ad hoc networks. We propose transactional agents for pervasive computing (TAPCO), which utilizes a dynamic hierarchical meta data structure that captures the semantic contents of the underlying heterogeneous data sources. Mobile agents process the transactions collaboratively, to preserve ACID properties without violating local autonomy of the data sources. TAPCO is simulated and compared against decentralized serialization graph testing (DSGT) protocol. The results show that TAPCO outperforms DSGT in several ways. In contrast to DSGT that did not consider local transactions, TAPCO supports both local and global transactions without violating the local autonomy.