Multiversion data broadcast

Abstract

Recently, broadcasting has attracted considerable attention as a means of disseminating information to large client populations in both wired and wireless settings. In this paper, we consider broadcasting multiple versions of data items to increase the concurrency of client transactions in the presence of updates. We introduce various techniques for organizing multiple versions on the broadcast channel. Performance results show that the overhead of supporting multiple versions can be kept low while providing a considerable increase in concurrency. Besides increasing the concurrency of client transactions, multiversion broadcast provides clients with the possibility of accessing multiple server states in a single broadcast cycle. Furthermore, multiversioning increases the tolerance of client transactions of disconnections from the broadcast channel.