Design of an efficient tentative hold protocol for automated coordination of multi-business transactions

The emerging Web services provide an effective means to carry out automated transactions between multiple business parties. While there are several specific protocols currently being discussed to address the coordination of Web services-enabled business transactions, we consider the tentative hold protocol (THP) that allows the placement of tentative holds on business resources prior to actual transactions in order to provide increased flexibility in coordination. We present a framework for applying THP in conjunction with 2PC to the problem in which service providers independently manage resources and clients seek to acquire the resources from multiple providers as a single atomic transaction. The proposed framework also facilitates the performance optimization of THP through effective parameterization with the notion of overhold size and hold duration. Accordingly, a detailed analysis is carried out to obtain an efficient method that can optimize the performance by adaptively determining the hold duration. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive approach yields a significant improvement over other non-adaptive policies.