Towards Distributed Real-Time Concurrency and Coordination Control

Abstract

Concurrency control is an important issue for environments in which shared data and system resources must be managed in real-time (i.e., with implicit or explicit time constraints). The real-time responsiveness and consistency requirements, which often conflict with each other, suggest that traditional transaction processing paradigms need to be modified for target applications. The time cognizant concurrency control techniques developed for centralized systems must be extended and adapted to the distributed environment. We discuss techniques developed for real-time transaction systems for partitioning data and concurrency control to support diverse consistency and responsiveness requirements — often within the same application. Furthermore, we suggest that some of the application-specific requirements may be better met by lower level communication and coordination protocols.