Server-side broadcast transaction in mobile computing environment

In mobile computing environments, there is an implicit assumption that the server is able to broadcast consistent data to mobile clients. This assumption may not be valid. In this paper, we formulate broadcasting data at the server as a broadcast transaction which reads the entire database in a consistent way before broadcasting data in a broadcast cycle. This issue is not trivial as the broadcast transaction will create high interference to normal update transactions at the server. Some algorithms proposed by previous studies on reading the entire databases could be candidates to solving the problem. However, we found that those algorithms are inadequate in handling update transactions correctly. Hence we devise a new algorithm, called the read-white set test to resolve such problems and minimize the interference to normal update transactions during reading process of the entire database for data broadcasting.