A Review of Data Synchronization and Consistency Frameworks for Mobile Cloud Applications

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the predom-inant means of accessing the Internet due to advances in wireless communication techniques. The development of Mobile applications (“apps”) for various platforms is on the rise due to growth in the number of connected devices. Numerous apps rely on cloud infrastructure for data storage and sharing. Apart from advances in wireless communication and device technology, there is a lot of research on special data management techniques that addressed the limitations of mobile wireless computing to make the data appear seamless for accessing and retrieval. This paper is an effort to survey the frameworks that support data consistency and synchronization for mobile devices. These frameworks offer a solution for the unreliable connection prob-lem with customized synchronization and replication processes and hence helps in synchronizing with multiple clients. The frameworks are compared for the parameters of consistency and data models (table, objects or both) support along with techniques of synchronization protocol and conflict resolution. The review paper has produced interesting results from the selected studies in areas such as data consistency, handling offline data, data replication, synchronization strategy. The paper is focused on client-centric data consistency and the offline data synchronization feature of various frameworks.

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