A framework for transaction-level quality of service for m-commerce applications

In the emerging wireless Internet environment involving m-commerce and other mobile applications, an increasing number of users are likely to adopt mobile transactions. These transactions may have very diverse requirements and some of them may require a significant amount of network resources and/or bounded delays. One of many unique characteristics of transactions involving a financial value is the criticality of its completion. The unique requirements of mobile transactions necessitate the introduction of new metrics for quality-of-service. So far, most of the quality-of-service research in wireless networks has focused on call or connection-level QoS. In this paper, we propose a framework to support QoS requirements of mobile transactions by resource allocation at the connection level, transaction level, and a combination of connection and transaction levels. To measure the QoS effectiveness of mobile transactions, two new metrics, transaction completion probability and transaction response time, are introduced. Simulation and analytical models are used for computing different metrics for transaction performance under varying network and traffic conditions. The results show that the balanced transaction and connection level resource allocation can improve the probability of transactions completion and resource utilization. This improvement is at the cost of slightly increased processing overload, which is dependent on both the group size and number of transactions during a connection.