A mobile cache consistency protocol using shareable read/write time locks

Object caching is often used to improve the performance of mobile applications, but the gain is often lessened by the additional load of maintaining consistency between an original object and its cached copy. This paper aims at reducing the consistency maintenance work and proposes a protocol that distinguishes between two classes of consistency (i.e. weak and strong) and treats them differently. Strong consistency is used for data that needs to be consistent all the time, whereas weak consistency is for cases when stale data can be tolerated or only specific updates are relevant to the application. Consistency is maintained by using strict and permissive read/write time locks that enable data sharing for a fixed time period and support concurrency control. A notification protocol for propagating updates to clients is also proposed. Performance tests have shown that switching from strong to weak consistency reduces the number of aborts due to conflicting operations by almost half even with high read/write sharing.