Multiversion locking protocol with freezing for secure real-time database systems

Database systems for real-time applications must satisfy timing constraints associated with transactions. Typically, a timing constraint is expressed in the form of a deadline and is represented as a priority to be used by schedulers. Recently, security has become another important issue in many real-time applications. In many systems, sensitive information is shared by multiple users with different levels of security clearance. As more advanced database systems are being used in applications that need to support timeliness while managing sensitive information, there is an urgent need to develop protocols for concurrency control in transaction management that satisfy both timing and security requirements. In this paper, we propose a new multiversion concurrency control protocol that ensures that both security and real-time requirements are met. The proposed protocol is primarily based on locking. However, in order to satisfy timing constraints and security requirements, a new method, called the freezing method, is proposed. In order to show that our protocol provides a higher degree of concurrency than existing multiversion protocols, we define a new serializability for multiversion concurrency control, called FR-serializability, which is more general than traditional serializability. We present several examples to illustrate the behavior of our protocol, along with performance comparisons with other protocols. The simulation results show significant performance improvement of the new protocol.