A Service Management Framework for M-Commerce Applications

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) refers to an ability to conduct wireless commerce transactions using mobile applications in mobile devices. M-commerce applications can range from as simple as an address book synchronization to as complicated as credit card transactions. M-commerce is expected to grow dramatically in the near future supporting simple to complex commerce transactions. Even though the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is designed to facilitate the development of wireless applications, it will not be sufficient to handle complex business transactions that require cooperation of different service applications. In order to handle these complex mobile commerce transactions efficiently, an intelligent, robust and scalable framework that provides diverse m-commerce services is required. This paper describes in detail such an m-commerce framework based on the Java Intelligent Network Infrastructure (JINI) and Wireless Applications Protocol (WAP).