DiTON: Towards facilitating distributed transactions in opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks (ONs) exploit mobility of wireless devices to route messages and distribute content independent of fixed network infrastructure. An inherent property of ONs is that the unpredictable mobility of devices results in brief and intermittent connections between networked nodes. This presents a challenge to implementing useful distributed system paradigms, such as distributed transactions. Transactions are a sequence of read and write operations that must be executed in a reliable and coherent fashion, even in the presence of multiple concurrent operations or process failures. Distributed transactions require the participation of multiple processes utilizing data available locally to collaborate with other processes. In this work in progress paper, we outline the requirements behind a novel cache-based mechanism for distributed transactions in ONs. The requirements are defined with the expectation that the proposed mechanism will be robust and energy efficient.