Managing Data Replication in Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Databases

Abstract

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless autonomous nodes without any fixed backbone infrastructure. All the nodes in MANET are mobile and power restricted and thus, disconnection and network partitioning occur frequently. In addition, many MANET database transactions have time constraints. In this paper, a data replication technique for real-time ad-hoc mobile databases (DREAM) is proposed that addresses all those issues. It improves data accessibility while considering the issue of energy limitation by replicating hot data items at servers that have higher remaining power. It addresses disconnection and network partitioning by introducing new data and transaction types and by considering the stability of wireless link. It handles the real-time transaction issue by replicating data items that are accessed frequently by firm transactions before those accessed frequently by soft transactions. DREAM is prototyped on laptops and PDAs and compared with two existing replication techniques using a military database application. The results show that DREAM performs the best in terms of percentage of successfully executed transactions, servers' and clients' energy consumption, and balance of energy consumption distribution among servers