A survey of distributed transaction processing standards and a proposal for mobile X/Open XA

Mobile computing is an area of considerable research both in academia and industry. The tremendous increases in the power of mobile computers and the availability of wireless communications has opened many opportunities to provide services to the mobile user. A major application of mobile computing is expected to be transaction processing. Recent standardization efforts have provided a transaction processing environment which is based on distributed computing and open systems. However the impact of mobile computing on these standards has not been considered.;This paper investigates transaction processing in mobile computing and includes a survey of current standardization organizations and software standards. Several observations on the formal standards process are made and the emergence of new a process based on user and vendor consortia is discussed.;As a result of this investigation an extension to the X/Open XA Distributed Transaction Processing standard is proposed. The extension is intended to enable more efficient processing of conventional transactions and to support a new class of transactions which are unique to mobile computing.