MX: Mobile Object Exchange for Collaborative Applications

MX is a new mobile caching system for collaborative applications accessing data residing in large storage repositories. MX supports mobile exchange – a direct user-to-user object transfer. Mobile exchange (MX) makes mobile computing more effective because it enables certain kinds of collaborative work that would be impossible otherwise. MX allows disconnected peers to learn of recent unknown updates, and to apply these updates to locally-cached data. MX validates the exchange, merging the more recent and modified data. MX combines efficient support for coarse-grained data transfer with efficient fine-grained validation, in a way that avoid the problem of false sharing. Performance evaluation of the MX prototype indicates that for transactional applications, the extra cost required to support mobile exchange is moderate. Moreover, the extra cost is offset by the cost of accessing remote repositories over high-latency networks.