Abstract
With the tremendous advances in hand-held computing and communication capabilities, rapid proliferation of mobile devices, and decreasing device costs, we are seeing a growth in mobile e-business in various consumer and business markets. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and framework for end-to-end mobile e-business applications (e.g., point of sales). The architecture takes into consideration disconnection, application context, synchronization, transactions and failure recovery modes to provide mobile users with seamless and transparent access to business transactions and business-context specific data. In our architecture, we consider a novel business process design based on state-machines and event management to handle disconnection, resource limitations and failures. We designed, implemented and deployed a system for mobile e-business on clients (e.g., PDAs and PocketPCs) integrated with private exchanges and sell-side servers. The state-machine model with failure recovery mechanisms enables handling of one-to-many and many-to-one disconnections in large mobile e-business environments. The e-business framework on mobile clients is implemented based on J2ME, Webservices, and open XML standards. A detailed performance study of commerce transactions was done on different mobile client devices with diverse computing, memory and storage capabilities. We compare the performance of a purchasing application and the middleware on various devices such as PDAs and Laptops. We demonstrated that for small devices with limited capability the performance is reasonable. For devices with more computing capability, the response time is excellent.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
G. Alonso et al., Exotica/FMDC: A workflow management system for mobile and disconnected clients, Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases (1996).
M.H. Dunham et al., A mobile transaction model that captures both the data and movement behavior, Mobile Networks and Applications 2(2) (1997) 149–162.
Durlacher Research Ltd., Mobile Commerce Report (February 2000).
D. Georgakopoulos et al., An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems (1995).
K. Gottschalk, S. Graham, H. Kreger and J. Snell, Introduction to Web services architecture, IBM Systems Journal 41(2) (2002).
IBM, Embedded database system: DB2e and Websphere commerce, www.ibm.com
A. Jhingran, Moving up the food chain: Supporting e-commerce applications on databases, SIGMOD Record 29(4) (2000) 50–54.
P. Muth et al., From centralized workflow specification to distributed workflow execution, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 10(2) (1998) 159–184.
B. Noble et al., Agile application-aware adaptation for mobility, in: Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) (1997) pp. 276–287.
D.K. Pradhan et al., Recoverable mobile environment: design and trade-off analysis, in: International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (FTCS) (1996) pp. 16–25.
P. Ram et al., Distributed Transactions in practice, SIGMOD Record (1999).
J. Sairamesh et al., A platform for sell-side private exchanges, IBM Systems Journal 41(2) (2002).
J. Sairamesh et al., Wireless B2B trading, in: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Mobile Commerce (conjunction with Mobicom, 2001).
M. Satyanarayanan, Mobile information access, IEEE Personal Communications (February 1996).
M. Satyanarayanan, Fundamental challenges in mobile computing, in: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Philadelphia (May 1996).
SyncML Consortia, www.syncml.org
D.B. Terry et al., Managing update conflicts in Bayou, a weakly connected replicated storage system, in: Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) (1995) pp. 172–183.
P. Timmers, Electronic Commerce: Strategies and Models for B2B Trading (Wiley, 1999).
A. Tsalgatidou et al., Challenges in mobile electronic commerce, in: Proceedings of the IeC 2000, 3rd Internat. Conf. on Innovation through E-Commerce, Manchester, UK, November 14–16 (2000).
Webservices Architecture-Working Draft, W3C-Architecture-WorkingGroup, www.w3c.org
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sairamesh, J., Goh, S., Stanoi, I. et al. Disconnected Processes, Mechanisms and Architecture for Mobile E-Business. Mobile Networks and Applications 9, 651–662 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MONE.0000042504.21014.61
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MONE.0000042504.21014.61