Towards an Integrated LBS-Enabled, Mobile Auctions Marketplace for Logistics Services

Rapid mobile communications penetration in Europe set the basis for the evolution of innovative mobile commerce applications. The integration of mobile commerce and Location-Based Services provides the infrastructure for geographically-focused trade of logistics services, such as the freight transport. The present paper presents a pragmatic information flow model of an auction-based freight transport marketplace, where potential bidders (carriers) are selected based on their current location. To safeguard auction trustworthiness the communication infrastructure should provide real-time multicast transmission of information before, during and after the auction process. In this article, we examine the importance of data communication workload as a performance factor and provide a parametric estimation for the communication requirements of the model.