Supporting mobile commerce applications using dependable wireless networks

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is an emerging discipline involving applications, mobile devices, middleware, and wireless networks. While most of existing e-commerce applications can be modified to run in a wireless environment, m-commerce also involves many more new applications that become possible only due to the wireless infrastructure. These applications include mobile financial services, user and location specific mobile advertising, mobile inventory management, wireless business re-engineering, and mobile interactive games. In addition to device and wireless constraints, mobile commerce would also be impacted by the dependability of wireless infrastructure. Unlike e-commerce applications that usually run on fixed networking infrastructure of fairly high dependability (approaching to about 100%), m-commerce applications may not receive such high dependability from the existing and emerging wireless infrastructure. So far, most of the m-commerce research focuses on applications, devices, and security issues. We believe that some work is necessary in addressing the dependability challenges of the wireless infrastructure. In this paper, we present (a) the dependability issues of wireless infrastructure, (b) several architectures to improve the dependability of wireless networks, and (c) a simulation model and results on wireless dependability for m-commerce. The results show that a significant improvement is possible in wireless dependability for supporting m-commerce applications.