A secure XML based synchronization scheme for mobile devices

Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Andreas Pitsillides, for his constant support all these years and for giving me the opportunity to participate in several interesting research projects and attend various international conferences. His help was valuable to finish this thesis work. I would also like to thank my fiancée and my family for their continuous support and understanding during these past two years. Executive Summary This thesis proposes a new approach to mobile database synchronization using latest standards like XML. This new approach is more appealing than the ones offered by modern mobile synchronization software, in the fact that it can be employed to organizations that involve virtual team management. Virtual team management adds more complexity and constraints to the task and therefore existing synchronization algorithms do not apply and they have to be adjusted. Furthermore, the underlying network and its state affect the performance of the algorithm. This is crucial, and must be taken under great consideration when developing any mobile application. Finally, in addition to a new algorithm of synchronizing mobile data, this thesis presents a complete platform architecture that enhances performance and security of the synchronization process by employing compression and encryption mechanisms.