We address the design of architectures and protocols for providing mobile users
with integrated Personal Information Services and Applications (PISA), such as
personalized news and financial information, and mobile database access. We
present a system architecture for delivery of PISA based on replicated
distributed servers connected to users via a personal communications services
(PCS) network. The PISA architecture partitions the geographical coverage area
into service areas, analogous to PCS registration areas, each of which is served
by a single local server. When a user moves from one service area to another,
the service is provided by the new local server. This is accomplished by a
service handoff, analogous to a PCS call handoff, which entails some context
information transfer from the old to the new server. We focus on the mobile
sales and inventory application as an example of a PISA with a well-defined
market segment. We design a database management protocol for supporting both
mobile and stationary salespersons. Our design uses the site-transaction escrow
method, thus allowing faster responses to mobile clients, minimizing the amount
of context information which must be transferred during a service handoff, and
allowing mobile clients to operate in disconnected mode by escrowing items on
their local disks. We develop a formal model for reasoning about
site-transaction escrow, and develop a scheme for performing dynamic resource
reconfiguration which avoids the need for time-consuming and costly database
synchronization operations (i.e., a two-phase commit) when the mobile sales
transaction completes. A further refinement to the scheme avoids an
n-way two-phase commit during resource reconfiguration
operations, replacing it with several simpler two-phase commits.