ABSTRACT
With the availability of inexpensive portable computers and with the growth in mobile and satellite communication technologies, mobile computing has attracted great attention from both research and industry. In many ways mobile computing can be compared to distributed computing, but constraints unique to mobile computing, such as low bandwidth of the wireless links, user and host mobility, and high vulnerability, have thrown up many challenges to researchers. Transaction models, data consistency, and cache management have been the focus for database researchers in mobile computing. Mobile transaction models are especially of interest, both academically and industrially, because it is envisaged that a major component of applications in mobile environments will involve database access or activities modeled as transactions. In this chapter, we present a survey on the various mobile transaction models proposed in the literature. We present a brief description of all the models and outline the various issues addressed by the mobile transaction model designers. We also compare mobile transactions on these issues and present a discussion on the issues yet to be addressed.
