Defining Location Data Dependency, Transaction Mobility and Commitment

Previous research in the area of mobile transactions has mainly concentrated in developing schemes for processing conventional transactions, location management, and data broadcast. No one has examined how such mobility issues as location dependent data impact the actual definition of a transaction in the mobile computing environment. There is a distinct lack of work related to data classification and developing new transaction models for the mobile environment. The objective of this paper is to fill this void. First we examine the effect of mobility on transaction processing and commitment, specifically examining the impact of location dependent data. We then develop a transaction model targeted for the mobile platform, propose new commitment protocols for mobile transactions and present a formal treatment of location dependent data. Our work presented opens up a new direction in mobile computing data processing. The ultimate goal of this paper is to spawn new research in the mobile computing arena