RIMoCoW, a reconciliation infrastructure for CORBA component-based applications in mobile environments
Résumé
Initially targeted at supporting individual work, personal devices are more and more used for collaborative activities in mobile environments. In this context, service continuity raises the problem of data availability during disconnections. This relies on optimistic replication with the deployment of a local copy of the necessary application components, leading to potential divergence of the distributed copies. Consequently, the main challenge consists in designing reconciliation mechanisms in order to synchronize copies at reconnection time. In this paper, we present RIMoCoW (Reconciliation Infrastructure for Mobile Collaborative Work) a reconciliation infrastructure designed and implemented for CORBA component-based applications in a mobile collaborative work environment. RIMoCoW follows a service-based approach and integrates SOCT4Mob (Serialization of Concurrent Operations by Transposition in Mobility) a synchronization algorithm we have extended for the mobile context. In addition, we propose recovery and sequencer related policies that fit to mobile requirements. Finally, RIMoCoW is implemented using an emergency management application. The performance results show that our infrastructure can reconcile in roughly 30 minutes more than 16.000 victims medical files filled by 8.000 rescuers, which corresponds to a level of 6 on a 6-degree European scale for technological accidents