A Prediction-Based Query Processing Strategy in Mobile Commerce Systems

The rapid advances and popularity of the Internet encourages the wide dissemination of electronic commerce. Various applications of electronic commerce, e.g., querying supermarket catalogs, purchasing products, booking a hotel room of a trip, etc., are rapidly increasing. Moreover, the emergence of mobile computing makes it possible for users to access information anywhere and at anytime. With the merging of these two technologies, millions of users in the near future could carry a mobile device requesting services through electronic commerce applications. While serving such a mobile user, the server should consider how to minimize the response time of the request. However, conventional strategies for query processing are no longer adequate in the mobile environment. This is mainly because the user may not be at the same site as where he/she issued the request when the result of the request is ready to be delivered to the user. The issue becomes more complicated when the user’s request involves data residing in multiple data sources. This paper proposes some strategies for query processing in a mobile commerce environment. All the strategies are presented, along with a cost analysis as the theoretical basis for the support of our design. Through the analysis of each strategy, we find the weakness of the strategy and improve it by a new design. Finally, the performances of all strategies are studied and compared to find the performance difference of the strategies.