Vehicular mobile commerce

Growing interest in mobile commerce among users, service providers, content developers, businesses, and researchers has spawned many new applications ncluding location-based services, mobile financial services, multiparty interactive games, and mobile auctions. Most of these applications are designed to be accessible via personal digital assistants or cell phones, but handhelds have limited capabilities and are impractical or dangerous to use while driving. Increased computing and communications power, coupled with advances in wireless networking technology and the explosive growth in wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments, have the potential to enable new m-commerce applications for drivers or passengers in motor vehicles. These applications range from entertainment and business services to diagnostic and safety tools. However, for vehicular m-commerce to become a reality, researchers must address a number of technical challenges.     

Multicast support in mobile commerce applications

Mobile commerce is an emerging discipline that involves mobile devices, applications, middleware, and wireless networks. Although most e-commerce applications can be modified to run in a wireless environment, m-commerce includes a wide range of new services ranging from locational advertising to mobile offices that are only possible with a wireless infrastructure. Among the many challenges m-commerce presents to network designers, service providers, vendors, and applications developers is providing support for multicast communications. Unlike broadcasting, in which everyone is sent a message, or replicated unicasting, in which messages are sent one by one to individual clients, multicasting involves sending messages to only a select group of mobile users. It thus avoids sending messages to too many users or using too many resources to send messages. The article presents five classes of m-commerce applications that require or can benefit from multicast support in wireless networks. Even among those requiring such support, specific requirements vary considerably. Reliability is an important requirement for many m-commerce applications, while real-time applications need low latency or a certain quality of service. Security is also a major concern in some instances     

Group-oriented mobile services: Requirements and solutions

Emerging mobile services, including m-commerce, have received considerable interest among researchers, developers, service providers, and users. Some of these mobile services will be group-oriented and thus require the support for group communications among mobile users. In this paper, several group-oriented mobile services and their specific requirements are presented and discussed. Several wireless solutions are also presented to meet the diverse and complex requirements of group-oriented mobile services.     

Predicting m-commerce adoption determinants: A neural network approach

M-commerce has continued to grow at an explosive rate. This purpose of this paper is to examine the predictors of m-commerce adoption by extending the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. The extended model incorporates additional constructs such as perceived value, trust, perceived enjoyment and personal innovativeness. A non-linear, non-compensatory model is developed to understand the predictors of m-commerce adoptions. Online survey was used to collect data from 140 Chinese users. Neural network analysis was used to predict m-commerce adoption, and the model was compared with the results from regression analysis. The neural network model outperformed the regression model in adoption prediction, and captured the non-linear relationships between predictors such as perceived value, trust, perceived enjoyment, personal innovativeness, users demographic profiles (e.g. age, gender and educational level), effort expectancy, performance expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions with m-commerce adoption. This study applied neural network to provide further understanding of m-commerce adoption decisions based on a non-linear, non-compensatory model. The UTAUT model was also extended to examine consumer information systems such as m-commerce. The m-commerce study conducted in this research is in China, one of the fastest growing m-commerce markets in the world.     

A fuzzy-based Power-aware management for mobile ad hoc networks

In recent years, people have become more dependent on wireless network services to obtain the latest information at any time anywhere. Wireless networks must effectively allow several types of mobile devices send data to one another. The Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is one important type of non-infrastructure mobile network that consists of many mobile hosts, usually cellular phones. The power consumption rate and bandwidth of each mobile host device becomes an important issue and needs to be addressed. For increasing the reliability of the manager in Hierarchical Cellular Based Management (HCBM), this paper proposed a Power-aware protocol to select a stable manager from mobile hosts by fuzzy based inference systems based on the factors of speed, battery power, and location. Further, our protocol can trigger a mobile agent to distribute the managerial workload.     

Deploying personalized mobile services in an agent-based environment

The mobile Internet allows users to obtain digitized contents and services from wired and wireless networks virtually anywhere at any time via different handheld mobile devices. However, due to the distinct features of mobile users, mobile devices and wireless networks, deploying mobile services is not as straightforward as generally expected. To ensure the success of mobile services, this paper presents a multi-agent framework that considers different contexts to support personalized services on wireless networks. In the proposed approach, client users, content providers, and service providers are all considered as software agents. They interoperate on the same platform to request and deliver mobile services. The most important issues related to agent operations and context awareness in an agent world are also discussed and analyzed. To verify our framework, different application services are developed accordingly on a publicly available middleware platform. Experiments are conducted for both services to evaluate their corresponding performance. The preliminary results show that our multi-agent approach to personalization is promising and efficient in the deployment of mobile services.     

Providing location based information/advertising for existing mobile phone users

In the emerging world of m-commerce potential users consistently cite location based information as one of the emergent services that they would most likely utilise. However, solutions for obtaining the specific location of a mobile user predominately rely on the provision of additional hardware and/or software within either the mobile phone or system infrastructure. Further, these techniques are often inappropriate for indoor and highly urban environments, where they are often most useful, as the line of sight to the location measurement unit is often obscured resulting in inaccurate and unreliable positional information. In this paper we present a system that can be used with any current mobile phone system to provide location based information/advertisements to any mobile phone, equipped with Bluetooth technology, without any necessity of installing client side software. The system is readily deployable and can be used to provide systems such as location based information for tourist in cities or museums or indeed location based advertisements.     

Performance evaluation of e-commerce requests in wireless cellular networks

Recent technological advances in mobile devices and wireless networks enable mobile users to order goods in an anywhere and anytime fashion. Quality of Service (QoS) provision is one of the most challenging issues in the heterogeneous wireless network-based e-commerce systems. Such e-commerce systems enable users to roam between different wireless networks operators and geographical areas while providing interactive broadband services and seamless connectivity. Due to movement of users during e-commerce requests, one of the most important QoS factors for successful completion of users' requests is related to handover of request from one cell to another. A handover could fail due to unavailability of sufficient bandwidth in the destination cell. Such failure of ongoing e-commerce requests is highly undesirable and can cause serious problems to the e-commerce users and the service providers. This paper proposes an enhanced priority queuing based handover scheme in order to ensure a seamless connectivity of e-commerce requests. It focuses on the performance anaylsis of the proposed scheme. Experimental study demonstrates that the proposed scheme provides QoS with low connection failure and mean response time for handover of e-commerce requests.     

A two-staged SEM-neural network approach for understanding and predicting the determinants of m-commerce adoption

The advancement in wireless and mobile technologies has presented tremendous business opportunity for mobile-commerce (m-commerce). This research aims to examine the factors that influence consumers’ m-commerce adoption intention. Variables such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, trust, cost, network influence, and variety of services were used to examine the adoption intentions of consumers. Data was collected from 376 m-commerce users. A multi-analytic approach was proposed whereby the research model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM), and the results from SEM were used as inputs for a neural network model to predict m-commerce adoption. The result showed that perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, trust, cost, network influence, and trust have significant influence on consumers’ m-commerce adoption intentions. However, the neural network model developed in this research showed that the best predictors of m-commerce adoption are network influence, trust, perceived usefulness, variety of service, and perceived enjoyment. This research proposed an innovative new approach to understand m-commerce adoption, and the result for this study will be useful for telecommunication and m-commerce companies in formulating strategies to attract more consumers.     

P2P移动电子商务模式研究

针对当前电子商务的发展情况,分析了几种模式下电子商务的缺点和不足,提出了一种新的商务模式-P2P模式。随着3G移动网络的到来,P2P模式的移动电子商务必然成为未来电子商务发展的趋势。在这一前提下给出了一种P2P移动电子商务机制。     

Ubiquitous spatial-information services using cell phones

Conventional thinking about mobile methods for accessing the Internet is rapidly changing. The processing power of cell phones is steadily improving, and the wireless network's communication speed is increasing. Once these changes are in place, most mobile applications will give way to a third-generation (3G) cell-phone-based infrastructure. In particular, using 3G cell phones instead of conventional PCs or personal digital assistants (PDAs) will make possible ubiquitous spatial information services. These services let you use a cell phone to easily find nearby hospitals, restaurants, banks, stores, and so on. Moreover, pedestrians will be able to use cell phones to receive navigational guidance services similar to those delivered by vehicle navigation systems. In this article, we introduce real system implementations and field trials to demonstrate the potential of this integrated spatial-information services approach.     

Unlocking the Advantages of Dynamic Service Selection and Pricing

Bandwidth limitations, resource greedy applications verbose mark-up languages and an increasing number of voice and data users are straining the air interface of wireless networks. Hence, novel approaches and new algorithms to manage wireless bandwidth are needed. In addition, usage based pricing is becoming increasingly prevalent (pre-paid cell phones, calling cards, non-contract minutes, etc.). This paper unlocks the potential to improving the performance of overall system behavior by allowing users to change service level and/or service provider for a (small) price. The ability to dynamically re-negotiate service gives the user the power to control QoS while minimizing usage cost. On the other hand, the ability to change service level pricing dynamically allows the service providers to manage traffic better, improve resource usage and most importantly maximize their profit. This provides a surprising win-win situation for BOTH the service providers AND the users. In this paper we present easy to implement on-line algorithms to minimize the overall usage cost to individual mobile users. This on-line algorithm continuously receives pricing information and evaluates minimum QoS requirements. The algorithm then determines appropriate service level, chooses a service provider and sets a time for re-negotiation dynamically. Our algorithm can handle many practical issues such as capacity limitations, arbitrary price fluctuations and loss/gain of service providers due to mobility. Our results do not assume any specific technologies and can be applied to any environment that can employ dynamic pricing, including wired networks. In fact, dynamic pricing is becoming increasingly desirable since service provider and capacity changes are a growing by-product of mobility. Arriving and departing users at/from a cell tower (or wireless LAN) can effectively reduce or increase the available bandwidth in a cell (or LAN transmission area) and represents a natural opportunity for a pricing change.     

Determining the mobile commerce user requirements using an analytic approach

Independent studies have shown that mobile commerce (m-commerce) can have an important influence on business and society in the future. Hence, network designers, service providers, vendors and application developers must carefully take the needs and considerations of various users into account to provide better services and attract them to m-commerce. Consequently, identifying the m-commerce user requirements and their significance becomes an essential and crucial process for the standardization and improvement of associated systems. On this line, the objective of this paper is to propose an analytic framework to provide practitioners a more effective and efficient model for prioritizing m-commerce requirements.     

Enabling pervasive computing with smart phones

Mobile telephony's technical and market success in Europe attracted researchers' interest in mobile systems. Some researchers began investigating appropriate architectures for providing information services to cellular mobile telephony users, and the quest for the "killer" third-generation (3G) mobile telephony application dominated the EU Information Society Technology research program. Dozens of projects launched to pursue this aim, and we were intimately involved in several of them. We report here on lessons learned during our involvement in this research and suggest how pervasive computing might benefit from this experience. Although some business and practical challenges exist, mobile phones could serve as information service end points, control devices for ubiquitous systems, network hubs for personal and body area networks, and ID tokens.     

Handy broker: an intelligent product-brokering agent for m-commerce applications with user preference tracking

One of the potential applications for agent-based systems is m-commerce. A lot of research has been done on making such systems intelligent to personalize their services for users. In most systems, user-supplied keywords are generally used to help generate profiles for users. In this paper, an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent has been designed for m-commerce applications. It uses an evaluation function to represent a user’s preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tracks the user’s preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside its evaluation function. A prototype called ‘Handy Broker’ has been implemented in Java and the results obtained from our experiments look promising for m-commerce use.     

Determinants of users’ intention to adopt m-commerce: an empirical analysis

The fast-growing penetration of mobile devices and recent advances in mobile technologies have led to the development of increasingly sophisticated services such as m-shopping for goods or services and m-payment. However, although the number of mobile subscribers is increasing, levels of actual m-commerce activities in many cases remain low. Determining what influences users’ intention to use m-commerce is therefore of growing importance. The purpose of this study was to investigate possible factors. To this aim, we developed a conceptual user adoption model based on technology acceptance model variables and on specific factors such as social influence, personal innovativeness, customization, and individual mobility. The empirical results show that social influence and customization significantly affect perceived usefulness; mobility, customization, and personal innovativeness significantly affect perceived ease of use; and perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a direct positive effect on behavioral intention.     

Mobile processors begin to grow up

As the chips have improved, the mobile-processor marketplace has begun to change. many mobile-device users now want and will pay for advanced features like wireless Web access and location-oriented services, such as finding a nearby restaurant. This requires more processor power than basic cell phones or simple information management PDAs have. Higher chip performance is thus becoming increasingly desirable. Vendors have been developing faster mobile processors. Designers will achieve faster clock speeds the same way they do in PC processors: with smaller feature sizes and optimized designs. The optimized designs include the integration of memory and other functions on a single chip     

Enhanced coverage through relay assisted carrier aggregation for cellular networks

Carrier aggregation (CA) is an important feature of next generation cellular networks to meet the growing demand for wireless broadband services from fast-growing mobile users. This also facilitates the efficient use of fragmented spectrum among users of varying data rates. However, this does bring in a number of new implementation challenges, among which energy efficiency along with ensuring coverage and capacity fairness for users becomes the fundamental challenge for such systems. This paper initially analyses the outage capacity of such systems for both intra- and inter-band CA. Then, relaying is proposed as an energy efficient technique for enhancing the capacity and coverage of such systems. In this context, the ergodic rate of a typical user is analysed for both single- and multi-flow relay assisted CA systems. Different band deployment configurations are also analysed and compared. Further, it is observed that relays can be utilised to boost the capacity of lower frequency component carriers ensuring better capacity fairness among the users.     

Semantic Access to Multichannel M-Services

M-services provide mobile users wireless access to Web services. In this paper, we present a novel infrastructure for supporting M-services in wireless broadcast systems. The proposed infrastructure provides a generic framework for mobile users to look up, access, and execute Web services over wireless broadcast channels. Access efficiency is an important issue in wireless broadcast systems. We discuss different semantics that have impact on the access efficiency for composite M-services. A multiprocess workflow is proposed for effectively accessing composite M-services from multiple broadcast channels based on these semantics. We also present and compare different broadcast channel organizations for M-services and wireless data. Analytical models are provided for these channel organizations. Practical studies are presented to demonstrate the impact of different semantics and channel organizations on the access efficiency.