A middleware framework for managing transactions in group-oriented mobile commerce services

The emerging group-oriented mobile commerce services are receiving significant interest among researchers, developers, wireless service providers, and users. Some of these services, including mobile auctions, mobile financial services, and multi-party interactive games, are transaction-oriented and will require the network and protocol support for managing transactions. In this paper, we focus on technical challenges of managing transactions in group-oriented mobile commerce services by presenting a framework, which includes requirements, membership-management and support for dependable transactions. More specifically, we present several group-oriented mobile services, characterize transaction requirements of group-oriented m-commerce services, present protocols for membership management to support both distributed and centralized processing, and present multi-network access and agent-based system for dependable transactions.