Transactional Support for Mobile Databases

With the widespread deployment of wireless communication infrastructure in the past decade, accessing information online while a client is on the move becomes a concrete possibility. Such a computing environment is often referred to as a mobile environment (Imielinski & Badrinath, 1994). A typical group of applications that deserve strong support under the mobile environment would be database access. Database systems that support operations initiated from mobile clients are referred to as mobile databases (Leong & Si, 1997). We have witnessed a tremendous growth in mobile database research in the past ten years. Yet only the most primitive results have been incorporated in real applications. This is due to the additional dimensions of complexity that the mobile environment has introduced, beyond standard client/server computing environment.