Modeling of concurrent web sessions with bounded inconsistency in shared data

Client interactions with modern web-accessible network services are typically organized into sessions involving multiple requests that read and write shared application data. Therefore when executed concurrently, web sessions may invalidate each other’s data. Depending on the nature of the business represented by the service, allowing the session with invalid data to progress might lead to financial penalties for the service provider, while blocking the session’s progress and deferring its execution (e.g., by relaying its handling to the customer service) will most probably result in user dissatisfaction. A compromise would be to tolerate some bounded data inconsistency, which would allow most of the sessions to progress, while limiting the potential financial loss incurred by the service. In order to quantitatively reason about these tradeoffs, the service provider can benefit from models that predict metrics, such as the percentage of successfully completed sessions, for a ce...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JPDC
• Authors: Alexander Totok, Vijay Karamcheti
• Keywords: Data Inconsistency, JPDC 2007, Service Provider, Web Sessions