21. A Group Data Synchronization Protocol in Mobile Environments

As mobile devices are being used extensively, for both personal and business applications, Data Synchronization (DS) technology faces a new challenge. Unlike personal data, it is sometimes necessary to share or propagate business data between co-workers. Therefore, mobile devices should be fully synchronized as a group. This paper refers to this operation a “group data synchronization (Group DS)”. In this paper, a new Group DS protocol that is compatible with the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DS protocol is proposed, implemented, and analyzed. OMA DS is an open industry-standard protocol for mobile DS environments. To achieve this, the OMA data record formats have been extended, the Server Alerted Sync operation has been implemented and new conflict detection/resolution policies have been established. In addition, a vote operation has been implemented to improve the synchronization reliability. The implementation results show that the memory required by the Group DS system is modest, and that the overall synchronization time does not substantially increase with an increase in the number of devices.