چارچوب میان افزاری برای مدیریت معاملات در خدمات گروه محور تجارت تلفن همراه

The emerging group-oriented mobile commerce services are receiving significant interest among researchers, developers, wireless service providers, and users. Some of these services, including mobile auctions, mobile financial services, and multi-party interactive games, are transaction-oriented and will require the network and protocol support for managing transactions. In this paper, we focus on technical challenges of managing transactions in group-oriented mobile commerce services by presenting a framework, which includes requirements, membership-management and support for dependable transactions. More specifically, we present several group-oriented mobile services, characterize transaction requirements of group-oriented m-commerce services, present protocols for membership management to support both distributed and centralized processing, and present multi-network access and agent-based system for dependable transactions.

The emerging mobile services, including mobile commerce services, are receiving significant attention in terms of identifying new applications, designing frameworks, and engineering networking solutions [8]. A more recent review of these services can be found in [3] and personalization for mobile commerce service is presented in [13]. Many m-commerce services including mobile auctions, multiparty games, mobile financial applications, mobile advertising, and mobile entertainment services will require group communications, where several users have to simultaneously interact for an outcome or the same information is sent to multiple users [2]. These group-oriented m-commerce services are likely to be transaction-oriented with significant monetary value of some transactions. These also have the potential to generate billions of dollars in revenue due to their business, entertainment, and monetary values. Before group-oriented m-commerce services can be implemented and widely deployed, many challenges, including transaction support, must be addressed. The support for transactions is inherently complex due to the need to co-ordinate group membership, manage user inputs, and implement application synchronization. The support for transaction may become even more difficult challenge due to brief dis-connectivity or intermittent connectivity in the underlying infrastructure and ad-hoc wireless networks, user mobility, and the varying performance of wireless links. These limitations will lead to poor transaction performance in terms of increased delays and lower transaction completion probability. We first overview some of the related work in this area. Although routing and related issues for wireless group-oriented services have received considerable attention [2], very little work exists for transactions in mobile services. So far, the transaction support primarily deals with database access under connectivity problems. This includes using synchronization [1], performing recovery for transactions [4], and using recovery protocol [7]. A preliminary simulation-based performance evaluation of group-oriented mobile services using basic time-out mechanisms has been presented in [9]. It can be observed that most of the work done so far primarily deals with database access and recovery for mobile transactions after an occurrence of wireless connectivity problem or failure. The following issues have not been addressed in the literature so far: (a) detailed requirements of group and transactions-oriented mobile commerce services, (b) support for group membership for mobile transactions under user mobility and wireless connectivity problems, and, (c) support for dependable transactions. Therefore, there is a need to address many of the above challenges in group and transactions-oriented mobile commerce services. The research questions we attempt to address are: (i) What are the major requirements of group and transactions-oriented mobile services? (ii) How to provide networking and protocol support for managing continued membership in group-oriented mobile services under user mobility and wireless connectivity problems? (iii) How to design networking support for ensuring the reliability of important and highly-valued transactions? Although each of the above questions may take a separate paper to provide necessary details, we attempt to address these issues here in the form of a framework [11]. This can be considered as the part of future decision support systems [5]. The challenges in the group and transactions-oriented mobile commerce services include (i) how to provide group management for mobile users who may even experience connectivity problems, (ii) how to support transaction performance such as reliability, (iii) how to charge for transactions and other business model and strategies issues for wireless service providers, and, (iv) user issues including adoption, training and trust issues. Although all of these challenges are very important, we have decided to focus on requirements and technical challenges as shown in Fig. 1.The group management deals with how to maintain group membership for mobile users even when they experience brief dis-connectivity and/or intermittent connectivity. The group management process can be implemented using network protocols, which can perform pre-processing, manage user inputs, check for failures, and offer support for multi-stage transactions. The group management process can be implemented by either distributed or centralized processing. For each of these scenarios, we present a protocol for group membership management. The support for dependable transaction requires that mobile users are allowed to complete their transactions even when not able to access a certain wireless network. For this requirement, we propose that mobile users can access one of several different wireless networks to complete their transactions. To support such multi-network access, we present network architecture and protocols for group members and coordinator. The major contribution of this paper is a framework for managing transactions that includes requirements of group-oriented m-commerce services, protocols for membership management, and network support for multi-step dependable transactions. The paper is formatted as follows: in section 2, we discuss group-oriented mobile commerce services, and the details of the proposed framework are presented in section 3. A discussion of current research and conclusion is presented in section 4.

Before group-oriented m-commerce services can be implemented and widely deployed, many challenges, including transaction support, must be addressed. The support for transactions is inherently complex due to the need to co-ordinate group membership, manage user inputs, and implement application synchronization. The support for transaction may become even more difficult challenge due to brief dis-connectivity or intermittent connectivity in the underlying infrastructure and ad-hoc wireless networks, user mobility, and the varying performance of wireless links. There are several challenges in the group and transactions-oriented mobile commerce services such as how to provide group management for mobile users who may even experience connectivity problems, how to support transaction performance such as reliability, how to charge for transactions and other business model and strategies issues for wireless service providers, and, user issues including adoption, training and trust issues. Our framework focused on the requirements and technical challenges. More specifically, we presented several group-oriented mobile services, characterized transaction requirements of group-oriented m-commerce services, presented the design of two protocols for membership management to support both distributed and centralized processing, and presented a multi-network access system for dependable transactions. The protocols are designed to perform a set of decisions based on transactions' requirements and connectivity and resources of wireless networks. The future work includes optimal combination of response time and transaction completion probability for diverse m-commerce services, combined effect of connectivity problems and failures on protocols' performance, cross-layer optimization of protocols, and transaction performance among users in multiple heterogeneous wireless networks with diverse connectivity patterns. Certainly much more work is also needed towards addressing social and management issues in group and transactions-oriented mobile commerce services, especially the ones dealing with user trust and business models of wireless service providers.