Future Directions

Abstract

Due to the need for DDBSs that has grown in many facets of our lives, as mentioned in Chapter 1, DDBSs are finding their way into a wider range and previously inconceivable application domains such as medical diagnostics, computer-aided manufacturing, etc. Designing an intelligent and efficient OMP in such a DDBS always poses considerable challenges to the system designers and implementation specialists. For different application domains 1, the requirements of OMPs such as system security/reliability and object consistency may be different and thus the performance measurements of OMPs may significantly vary (Refer to Section 5 of Chapter 1). Recently, the rapid proliferation of mobile devices and their utility in several application domains also pose several other challenges for DDBS applications. As mobile bandwidth availability is an inherent constraint to several applications, service providers are expected to provide with a guaranteed and reliable service infrastructure to the users interacting over mobile networks. DDBS applications over mobile networks will be promising and a viable technology only when service providers put their best effort to maximize the resource utilization and at the same time proposing a very cost-effective solution. The strategies we have put in place to demonstrate the cost analysis in MCEs clearly reflect the fact that mobile technology is indeed promising, as we can directly compare the competitive ratios between identical applications operating in SCEs and MCEs. From service providers perspective, monetary cost is a parameter of direct and relevant interest and the analysis covered in this book indeed captures this metric. Of course, the cost is a function of several components which are not merely influenced by strategies that one may design but also depending on the availability and use of resources in the network.