Reducing the vulnerability window in distributed transactional protocols

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a technique that can be used by distributed transactional protocols to reduce the vulnerability window of transactions. For this purpose, we propose a so far unexplored (to the best of our knowledge) usage of hybrid clocks. On one hand, loosely synchronized physical clocks are used to maximize the freshness of the snapshots used by transactions to read. On the other hand, logical clocks are used to reduce the extent to which the snapshot of update transactions is advanced upon their commit. We claim that the joint usage of these two techniques can potentially reduce the abort rate in comparison to previous protocols such as Clock-SI, GMU, and SCORe.