A policy-based context-aware approach for the commitment of mobile transactions

The transaction paradigm ensures consistency in the presence of concurrent accesses to shared data and in the presence of failures. Traditionally, the transaction semantics is defined by the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) which implementation is through such mechanisms as commitment protocols ensuring Atomicity and concurrency control protocols ensuring Isolation. Many transactional models were developed to support the diverse and variable applications needs, and more recently to overcome the constraints induced by the evolution of distributed systems environments toward wireless and mobile. Indeed, the latter are characterized by limitations in computing resources, communications and energy as well as dynamic variations in terms of resource availability and configuration. In this paper, our contribution is mainly focused on the problem of atomic commitment. We adopted an approach based on the context-aware adaptation for the management of mobile transactions. We therefore present the commit protocol aTCP (Adaptable Transaction Commit Protocol) which allows for adaptation to the requirements of applications and mobile context in terms of transactional properties and execution cost. For the implementation of aTCP we offer a context-aware architecture based on policies.