The data management problem in post-pc devices and a solution

  • Authors:

  • Ramakrishna Gummadi;Randy H. Katz

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • EW 9 Proceedings of the 9th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop: beyond the PC: new challenges for the operating system
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The demand for network-enabled limited-footprint mobile devices is increasing rapidly. A central challenge that must be addressed in order to use these next-generation devices effectively is efficient data management --- persistent data manipulated or required by applications executing on these computationally and communicationally impoverished devices must be consistently managed and made highly available. This data management has traditionally been the responsibility of the OS on which applications execute. In this paper, we extend this conventional OS functionality to include post-pc devices. We propose a novel programmatic solution to the problem of maintaining high data availability while attaining eventual consistency [16] in the presence of mobility and disconnected operations, device and network failures, and limited device capabilities. We achieve this by using a combination of a novel proxy architecture, a split request-reply queue based on soft-state principles, and a two-tier update/commit protocol. We also exploit strong object typing to provide application-specific conflict handling in order to attain faster eventual consistency, as well as greater probability of automatic reconciliation.