On the design of a mobile agent environment for context-aware M-commerce

Due to technological advances of handheld computing and communication devices, Mobile commerce (M-commerce) has emerged and attracted a growing number of research efforts. M-commerce not only extends Internet-based Electronic commerce (E-commerce), but also offers a unique business opportunity with its own features, such as ubiquity, accessibility, portability, etc. In this paper, we discuss some important issues in the design of an M-commerce platform based on agent technology and context-aware workflow analysis. Deploying mobile agents and context-awareness in M-commerce can reduce unnecessary network traffic, tolerate poor network connectivity, provide more advanced services, support automation of decision-making, reduce participation costs and improve trading efficiencies.