Conflict Resolution of Data Synchronization in Mobile Environment

Proliferation of personal information devices results in a difficulty of maintaining replicated copies of the user data in data stores of the various devices. Data synchronization is an automated action to make the replicated data be consistent with each other and up-to-date. The traditional consistency models and the conflict resolution schemes do not fit to the synchronization of replicated data in the mobile computing environment due to the lacks of simultaneous update. This paper shows characteristics of data synchronization and conflict between replicated data in the mobile environment and defines the resolution rules for each conflict scenario under the recent-data-win policy. These rules have been implemented and verified in a data synchronization server which was developed based on the SyncML specification [1].