Transaction management for m-commerce at a mobile terminal

Although there has been a lot of discussion of "transactions'' in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), little attention has been paid for distributed transactional properties of the computations facilitating m-commerce. In this paper we first present a requirement analysis for m-commerce transactions, a graph-based transaction model, and a Transaction Manager (TM) architecture for a wireless application that protects m-commerce work flows against communication link, application, or terminal crash. The application interface, modules and log structure, as well as a pilot implementation of this TM for the location-based application are presented. We further discuss other alternatives to design such a TM that together can be called "Ontological Transaction Monitor'', which assumes also monitoring constraints related to security and privacy. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.