A middleware framework for managing transactions in group-oriented mobile commerce services

a r t i c l e i n f o 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, multi-party 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 coordinate 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]. …