Loosely-coupled, mobile replication of objects with transactions

Advances in wireless technology and affordable info-appliances are making mobile computing a reality. However, programmers do have a real hard task while developing mobile distributed applications in which sharing is needed. Such difficulty arises, mainly because programmers are forced to deal with system level issues such as consistency, durability, availability, etc. We designed, implemented and evaluated an object-based platform called M-OBIWAN that releases the programmer from the above mentioned system-level issues. It supports mobile transactions and replication in an integrated way. In contrast with other approaches, M-OBIWAN provides an automatic replication mechanism allowing the creation of dynamic clusters of objects which are accessed within transactions. In addition, the transactional model is adapted to mobile environments. A prototype implementation has been developed. Its performance has been measured with PDAs and desktop machines, linked via Bluetooth.