Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Geographically distributed database systems are used to manage and process information generated by many large-scale applications. They provide strong transactional guarantees for applications, but require many wide-area network roundtrips to process transactions that access data stored in different geographical regions. This makes them unsuitable for use in latency-sensitive applications, causing many application developers to replace transactions with their own error-prone application-level solutions. Our previous work has addressed parts of this problem by reducing the number of wide-area network roundtrips required to process geo-distributed transactions. However, workloads with high contention can still cause high abort rates and slow-path processing in the underlying agreement protocol. This work aims to overcome this limitation by introducing deadline-aware scheduling and concurrency control policies that take advantage of properties of a specific class of transactions, and adding artificial delays to specific network messages, which can reduce contention between concurrent transactions.