Wide Area Networked Database Systems (WANDS)

• Panos K. Chrysanthis, Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh
• Sujata Banerjee,Telecommunications, University of Pittsburgh
• Emails: sujata@tele.pitt.edu, panos@cs.pitt.edu

Student Researchers

• George Kyrou, CS Dept.
• Prachyaporn Liangsutt Hisakon, IST Dept.
• Jeff Pike, CS Dept.
• Bryan Sorrows, IST Dept.

Project Funding Information

• Title: Reliable Data Sharing in Wide Area Gigabit Networked Databases
  Sponsor: National Science Foundation, IIS-9812532, August 1998-July 2001
• Title: Data Access and Recovery in High Speed Wide Area Networked Databases
  Sponsor: Pitt Central Research Development Fund, July 1997-June 1999

Project Summary

This project's goal is to study the impact of the new capabilities of high-speed networks on the design and performance of data management protocols. In particular, the focus is on high-speed wide-area networks (WANs) where the propagation latency is the dominant communication cost, the migration of large amounts of data is not an issue, and efficient multicasting and guarantees on network Quality of Service (QoS) parameters are available. In this project, existing concurrency control, commit and recovery protocols are being evaluated with respect to performance scalability under the new network assumptions. Further, new protocols are being developed that utilize the huge bandwidth and minimize the number of sequential phases of messages exploiting the multicasting capability and the provision of QoS guarantees such as bounded end-to-end packet delay and packet loss. At the same time, because of the need to scale to thousands of clients and servers, not all of which may be operational at any given time, the new WAN data management protocols are designed to achieve higher site autonomy in a cooperative manner, reducing global synchronization and supporting disconnected operations. The various protocols are empirically evaluated using computer simulation under different scenarios.

Project References

• Sujata Banerjee and Panos K. Chrysanthis. Network Latency Optimizations in Distributed Database Systems, In Proceedings of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 532-540, Orlando, FL, February 1998 Postscript File (214KB).
• Sujata Banerjee and Panos K. Chrysanthis. Performance evaluation of the g-2PL protocol, In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems (PDCS), pp. 428--432, New Orleans, Louisiana, October, 1997. Postscript File (140KB)
• Sujata Banerjee and Panos K. Chrysanthis. A Fast and Robust Failure Recover Scheme for Shared-Nothing Gigabit-Networked Databases, In the Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems (PDCS), pp. 684--689, Dejon, France, September 1996. Postscript File
• Sujata Banerjee and Panos K. Chrysanthis. A New Token Passing Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm, In the Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-16), pp. 717--724, Hong Kong, May 1996. Postscript File (154KB)
• Sujata Banerjee and Panos K. Chrysanthis. Data Sharing and Recovery in Gigabit-Networked Databases, In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (IC3N-95), pp. 204--211, Las Vegas, September 1995. Postscript File (287KB)

Area Background

The same reasons that caused the emergence of the client-server database systems to become the predominant distributed database architecture in local area networks (LANs), combined with ever faster and cheaper computers, cheaper stable memory, high-speed networks and network-aware applications, are now causing unprecedented growth in information/distributed database systems over wide area networks (WANs). The World Wide Web (WWW) is a prime example of a WAN data-server system which is primarily read-only for the time being. In the future, it is expected that general data-server systems (also called data shipping or enhanced client-server systems) in which clients perform much of their query and transaction processing locally, will be deployed over wide-area networks (WANs). It is also expected that multiple WAN servers will operate cooperatively and that WAN clients will evolve and function as data-servers over local-area networks that will also need to cooperatively process transactions across multiple WAN servers, creating an even more powerful distributed database environment of multiple data-servers and collaborating-servers over WANs. It is within such a database environment that we envision that nation- and world-wide enterprises, for example, will be operating and electronic commerce will be carried out.

In order to realize such powerful distributed database environments, there is a need to study the impact of the new capabilities of high speed networks on the design, the performance and the scalability of data management protocols, specifically the availability of huge bandwidth, of efficient multicasting and of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees.