Solutions and Challenges in Data Management

Submitted By

B. Srinivas G. S. Chandan
III/IV C S E III/IV C S E

Email:
srinivas_sree4u@yahoo.co.in
schandan_g@yahoo.co.in

Department Of
Computer Science and Engineering
Sir C. R. Reddy College Of Engineering
Eluru, Andhra Pradesh
Abstract:
Mobile computing is a new emerging computing paradigm posing many
challenging data management problems. We identify these new challenges and
investigate their technical significance. New research problems include management of
location dependent data, frequent disconnections, structuring distributed algorithms for
mobile hosts, wireless data broadcasting, and energy efficient data access. In this paper
we discuss General Architecture of wireless network and palmtops and Mobility,
Disconnection and Scale. We also have gone through New Information Medium, New
Resource Restrictions in this paper.
1 Introduction:
The rapidly expanding technology of cellular communications, wireless LAN, and
satellite services will make it possible for mobile users to access information anywhere
and at anytime. Regardless of size all mobile computers will be equipped with a wireless
connection to information networks. The resulting computing which is often called
Mobile or Nomadic computing will create entire new class of application possibly,
massive markets combining personal computing and consumer electronics.
Users carrying personal communicators will be able to receive and send
electronic mail from any location irrespective of time. They will be capable of processing
simple, form based transactions such as the point of sales, inventory orders etc. Such
services will require access to databases from anywhere and at any time. Mobile wireless
units are now being used by number of car rental companies. Another existing
application of mobile computing is the so called active badge technology, where infrared
communication is used for locating employees and redirecting voice mail and data.
Global architecture model consists, two sets of entities mobile hosts and fixed hosts.
Some of the fixed hosts, called MSS (Mobile Support Stations), are augmented with a
wireless interface to communicate with mobile hosts. Additionally, the MSS will provide
commonly used application software, so that a mobile user can download the software
from the closest MSS and run it on the palmtop or execute it remotely on the MSS. Since
not every file is carried on mobile plat form, each mobile user will be ssociated with a
home MSS which will store such as user profile, access rights, together with user’s
private files.

Model of a System to Support Mobility

This architecture is intended to support both smaller units which we call dumb terminals
and larger units which we call walk stations. The dumb terminals will rely completely on
the MSS; will participate in any global distributed environment only via proxies, residing
on the fixed network. Here the problems are related to ubiquitous networking. The walk
stations, on the other hand, will do a significant amount of processing locally and only
occasionally use the resources of the MSS. Walk stations will have its own disk on which
it can cache a portion of the external database, which can be queried and updated. Such a
mobile unit can be both a client as well as a mobile server. Even in this model, the issues
and problems vary depending upon the kind of data. Kind of data can be 1) private data
2) public data.3) shared data. Fixed hosts and the communication paths between them
constitute the static or the fixed network, and can be considered to be the trusted part of
the infrastructure. Mobile computing contrary to personal computing has a strong
research component. This is due to mobility of users. Mobility has consequences for
systems designers comparable to that of distributed systems. Similar to distributed
transaction processing, distributed query processing and distributed recovery, we will
have to provide capabilities for mobile transaction processing and query as well as
recovery for mobile host .Mobile computing will bring about a new style of computing.
Due to battery restrictions, the mobile units are frequently disconnected (powered off).
Most likely, short bursts of activity, like reading and sending e-mail, or querying local
databases will be separated by substantial periods of disconnection. Although the unit
woke up in a totally new environment, changes should appear seamless to the user.
Mobile computing poses new challenges to the data management
community. It is useful to group the major challenges brought by the vision of mobile
computing into the following categories.
1. Mobility, disconnection and scale
2. New information medium and new resource limitations.
The wireless medium will provide a powerful new method of disseminating
information to a large number of users. New access methods and new data organization
paradigms will have to be developed both for providers of broadcast information as well
as recipients. Limited bandwidth of the wireless connection and battery power limitations
of the mobile hosts are new resource limitations which will substantially affect data
management.

2. General Architecture:
2.1 Networks: The Personal Communication Network (PCN) of the future will
provide a wide variety of information services to users regardless of their location. The
general architecture of such a network is still very much under debate, yet it is clear that
it will include and extend existing infrastructures such as:
1. The cellular (microcellular) architecture capable of providing voice and data
services to users with hand held phones. The cellular network is connected to the
public phone network.
2. The wireless LAN: a traditional LAN extended with a wireless interface to service
small low powered portable terminals capable of wireless access. The wireless
LAN is further connected to a more extensive fixed network such as LAN, WAN,
Internet, etc.
3. Specialized service oriented architectures such as those providing data
broadcasting over unused portions of FM radio or satellite services (paging) for
users with special terminals.
The satellites are interconnected via microwave links, thus forming a global network in
space with linkage to the ground via gateways. The gateways are connected to the
public phone network and are capable of connecting to other non satellite users. The
satellites orbit providing coverage over different areas; a satellite's coverage or cell
moves through users rather than user moving through cells in the cellular Hands-off
occur from satellite to satellite. Thus mobile users are provided with instant access to
communication and information anywhere in the world.
The initial applications for satellite systems are predominantly voice and
paging. The general communication architecture for PCN system configuration of a
cellular network consists of fixed information network extended with wireless network
elements. The whole geographic area is partitioned into cells. Each cell is covered by a
base station, which is attached to the fixed network and provides a wireless
communication link between the mobile users and the rest of the network, as shown in
Figure.

Currently, the average size of a cell is of the order of 1-2 miles in diameter .The need
for cells stems from frequency reuse schemes that aim to better utilize the limited radio
frequency spectrum available.
There is a hierarchy L of location servers, as shown in Figure, which are connected
among themselves and to the base stations by the regular network Typically , location
 servers correspond to Mobile switching offices and there are about 60-100 base
stations” under" a leaf level location server.
Each user will be permanently registered under one of the location servers; this
location server is also called as the Home Location Server. This association of a user
with a particular home location server is fully replicated across the whole network.
Location servers, however, do not have to know in which cell a given mobile terminal
is currently located; they can always and out by paging, which is multicasting a
message to a subset of base stations” under" the given location server. If the call is in
progress, as the user moves from one base station to another, a new frequency is
assigned at the new base station. The call continues to proceed using this new
frequency. This process of transition between two frequencies is called the handoff
The database that stores a user's current location will typically be located at his
home location server but may also be distributed across many levels of location servers
as well. This information together with a certain amount of paging is used to contact a
mobile user (call set up). This call connection can occur between two mobile users or
from a mobile unit to a fixed unit
Cellular phones mainly provide voice services to mobile users. Wireless LANs are
already available. The two ends of the wireless link are:
1) A special Ethernet hub that acts as wireless interface to the fixed network and 2) a
wireless network interface card attached to the computing unit. Packet exchange
between the Ethernet hub and the computing unit takes place via this interface card. A
LAN with wireless interface hubs and the interface cards attached to the computing
units form the wireless LAN.
2.2 Palmtops: These palmtops fall into two categories. The first category consists of
machines that resemble a data organizer. The input device on these machines is still a
key board. Typical on-board memory ranges from1/2 to 1M. The processor clock
speed range from 5 to 7 MHz. CPUs requires low power.
The second categories of machines have the power of a desktop PC. The typical
input devices include a pen as well as a keyboard. Memory is typically in the range 2 to
8M. The processors of these machines run at a high speed. The disadvantage of these
higher clock speed palmtops is that of a very low battery life
 .3.Mobility, Disconnection and Scale:
Mobility is a behavior with implications for both the fixed as well as the
wireless networks. On the fixed network, mobile users can establish a connection from
different data ports at different locations. Wireless connection enables virtually
unrestricted mobility and connectivity from any location within the radio coverage.
Mobility is an important new component that will have far reaching consequences for
systems design. Purely from a data management perspective, location of a user, due to his
mobility becomes a dynamically changing piece of data with one writer and possibly
many readers.
Due to mobility, the system configuration is changing all the time. Additionally, all
major distributed computing algorithms which rely on a fixed logical structure within the
system are seriously affected. Another factor, along with mobility, that will change the
global configuration of the system is frequent disconnection of mobile terminals to save
power.

3.1 Location Management: In the mobile environment, the location of a user can be
regarded as a data item whose value changes with every move. Hence, location becomes
a frequently changing piece of data. Establishing a connection requires knowledge of the
location of the party we want to establish a connection with. This implies that locating a
person is the same as reading the location “data" of that person. Such a read may involve
an extensive search across the network as well as a database look up. Writing the location
variable may involve updating the location of the user in the local database as well assign
other replicated remote databases.
Each user is attached to a home location server which always “knows" his current
address. When a user moves, he informs his home location server about his new address.
The major disadvantage of this scheme involves the management of so called
Global”move.In order to route the message appropriately, one has to contact the location
server which knows receiver. This scheme is based on the assumption that most messages
are exchanged between local parties or between a user and its home location area
Calling and Mobility Profiles If the caller is located in Illinois There are a number of
possibilities: such a caller will have to contact once home location server or, in case it
does not exist, then the caller can perform an expanding search from his current location
(Illinois). The expanding search starts from the Illinois area and proceeds to higher levels
of location servers and eventually may end up searching the whole network. The moving
user informed some designated locations in the network about each of his moves. In fact,
the traffic resulting from the location updates in the communication network may exceed
the current communication traffic in cellular networks by an order of magnitude. One
possible remedy to this problem is not to inform about every single change in location but
rather maintain incomplete information about the location of the user.
Another important characteristic of the user is what we term the call to mobility
ratio. Call refers to the number of calls made to the user and mobility refers to the
number of moves the user makes in a given period of time. Two possible strategies can
be applied to locate users: paging or pointer forwarding. Which among the two is better
depends on the ratio between the number of calls and the number of moves made by the
user. For low call to mobility ratios, the paging scheme is beneficial compared to the
pointer forwarding scheme The pointer forwarding scheme becomes beneficial for high
call to mobility ratios. In such a case, the cost of location updates is amortized over the
large number of calls - virtually eliminating all search cost in this case.
3.1.1 Queries Location like any other piece of data item can be a subject of complex
queries. Ad-hoc queries may be formed by users; they also may be formed by the
network or the system administrator to balance the system's load dynamically. In general,
we will face the following choices for query processing: Those that rely only on the
database information while processing a query. Since the data in the database may be
imprecise the answer to the query will also be imprecise and possibly prone to errors.
Those that send additional messages to find out the exact locations of objects which are
relevant to the query. Querying changing locations requires careful combination of spatial
query processing along with the management of incompletely specified data.
Incompletely specified location can be “completed” in the run time of a query by
additional messaging. The problem is difficult, since it involves several dimensions.
Solutions which are optimal in terms of numbers of messages sent, may display a very
poor performance in terms of latency. Also, it is not clear how detailed the statistical
problems of the users ought to be in order to provide a significant performance
advantage.
3.2 Static or Mobile? - Configuration Management
Mobility changes the configuration of the system. Mobile clients may find
themselves far away from their servers; servers may also move further away from their
clients. Thus, system will have to adapt to dynamic reconfiguration of any logical
structure within the system and relative distribution of clients and servers. Mobility
introduces the cost of search to the global cost analysis. In general, the less informed the
party is, the more the search cost incurred. Hence, mobility substantially affects data
placement and the mobile consumer may no longer “deserve" a replica of the data item
due to the search overhead which his moves create for the producer
Distributed transaction processing may involve large groups of mobile users whose
relative positions in the network have to be carefully monitored. One has to be able to
constantly track where the” center of mass" of a group of users is located, to be able to
determine the optimal position of the coordinating site. The cost of sending a message
from one host to another involves search, and hence it is no longer fixed for a given
<source, destination> pair. Second, as hosts move, physical connections change. A basic
approach to designing distributed algorithms for mobile hosts is to localize most of the
computational and communication load of the distributed algorithms and protocols on the
static portion of the system.
3.3 Disconnection The main distinction between disconnection and failure is its
elective nature disconnections can be treated as planned failures - which can be
anticipated and prepared. There may be various degrees of disconnection ranging from
total disconnection to weak disconnection. Weak disconnection or narrow connection
occurs when a terminal is connected to the rest of the network via low bandwidth
wireless channel.
3.3.1 Cache Consistency If the mobile user has cached a portion of the shared
database on his platform he may request different levels of cache consistency. Each type
of connection may have a different degree of cache consistency associated with it.
Further, wireless broadcasting seems to be a powerful way of propagating the changes to
a massive number of users who are weakly connected to the server through a wireless
channel. Depending upon what are broadcasted, appropriate schemes can be developed
for maintaining consistency of data of a distributed system with mobile clients.
3.3.2 Handoff and Recovery The partially executed transaction may be left by the
mobile user as a will to be executed by the local fixed host according to the instructions
given by the mobile host before disconnection. For instance, the mobile user may wish to
buy AT&T stocks if it reaches anew high today. He may then leave his \will" in the form
of an active rule at the local host.
3.4 Scale: The scale of the mobile environment just described will go far beyond any of
the existing paradigm. Scale has major consequences on limited bandwidth resources: the
Increasing number of users requires using smaller and smaller cells. This in turn
complicates the location and configuration management due to increasing number of
handoffs. Massive scale of the system also results in its heterogeneity.
4 New Information Medium, New Resource Restrictions
Wireless broadcasting will provide data “in a new form" that is literally “on the air".
Bandwidth limitations as well as battery power limitations will define new cost measures
for accessing data and consequently may favor new solutions.
5 What is affected?
In general, we believe that mobility and portability may have as wide ranging an impact
on systems design as distribution had in the past. Distribution affected transaction
processing, query processing, crash recovery, physical data structures including data
placement, security and integrity and many other general systems issues such as
operating system design.

6 Conclusions
Management of data in the massively distributed environment of mobile computing
offers new challenging research problems. We have identified those challenges, provided
some preliminary solutions and formulated a number of open problems. Data
management issues offers new challenges both at the global, network level as well at the
local computing platform of a palmtop computer. The scale of the system and mobility of
its parts are unprecedented and the current network infrastructure is simply not capable of
providing adequate support.