A Caching Policy to Support Read - only Transactions in a Mobile ComputingEnvironmentMan Hon

Mobile computing is a new and challenging technology which will deenitely revolutionize the way we use computers in the next decade. A mobile computing environment consists of stationary supporting servers and a set of mobile computers connecting to the servers by a low-bandwidth wireless network. The main diierence between a traditional client-server environment and a mobile computing environment is that the mobility of mobile computers is unrestricted. Therefore, a mobile computer can disconnect from a server and connect to a diierent server at any time. In addition, a server may not have any information about which mobile computers are currently connecting to it. Hence, the issue of maintaining a consistent cache becomes complicated. In this paper, a caching policy is proposed to maintain cache consistency for mobile computers so that locks are not required for read-only transactions from mobile computers while serializability is guaranteed.