A Novel Replication Strategy for Large-scale Mobile Distributed Database Systems

An important challenge to database researchers in mobile computing environments is to provide a data replication solution that maintains the consistency of replicated data. The paper addresses this problem for large scale mobile distributed database systems. Our solution represents a new binary hybrid replication strategy in terms of its components and approach. The new strategy encompasses two components: replication architecture to provide a solid infrastructure for distributing replicas and updates propagation protocol to
propagate recent updates between the components of the replication architecture in a manner that achieves the consistency of data. The new strategy is a hybrid
of both pessimistic and optimistic replication approaches in order to exploit the features of each. These features are supporting large number of replicas and
lower rate of inconsistencies between them as well as supporting the mobility of users. The proposed replication strategy is compared with a baseline replication
strategy and shown that it achieves updates propagation delay reduction, less communication cost, and load balance as important requirements for
maintaining consistency in large scale environments with large number of replicas and highly mobile users.