Title
Simba: tunable end-to-end data consistency for mobile apps.
Abstract
Developers of cloud-connected mobile apps need to ensure the consistency of application and user data across multiple devices. Mobile apps demand different choices of distributed data consistency under a variety of usage scenarios. The apps also need to gracefully handle intermittent connectivity and disconnections, limited bandwidth, and client and server failures. The data model of the apps can also be complex, spanning inter-dependent structured and unstructured data, and needs to be atomically stored and updated locally, on the cloud, and on other mobile devices. In this paper we study several popular apps and find that many exhibit undesirable behavior under concurrent use due to inadequate treatment of data consistency. Motivated by the shortcomings, we propose a novel data abstraction, called a sTable, that unifies a tabular and object data model, and allows apps to choose from a set of distributed consistency schemes; mobile apps written to this abstraction can effortlessly sync data with the cloud and other mobile devices while benefiting from end-to-end data consistency. We build Simba, a data-sync service, to demonstrate the utility and practicality of our proposed abstraction, and evaluate it both by writing new apps and porting existing inconsistent apps to make them consistent. Experimental results show that Simba performs well with respect to sync latency, bandwidth consumption, server throughput, and scales for both the number of users and the amount of data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2741948.2741974
EuroSys
Field
DocType
Citations 
Computer science,End-to-end principle,Real-time computing,Unstructured data,Mobile device,Throughput,sync,Data model,Distributed computing,Cloud computing,Data consistency
Conference
13
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.59
35
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dorian Perkins1130.59
Nitin Agrawal299956.74
Akshat Aranya313510.11
Curtis Yu42058.99
Younghwan Go5130.59
Harsha Madhyastha6161084.72
Cristian Ungureanu743625.80