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), very little attention has been paid for distributed transactional properties of the computations facilitating m-commerce. In this paper, we first present a requirement analysis and then present a wireless terminal-based transaction manager (TM) architecture. This architecture is based on the assumption that there is an application that supports certain business transaction(s) and that it uses the TM to store transactional state information and retrieve it after a communication link, application, or terminal crash. We present the design of such a TM, including the application interface, modules and log structure. A pilot implementation of this TM for the location-based application is also discussed. We further discuss other alternatives to design such a TM that together can be called "ontological transaction monitor". This acts as an intelligent component between the application and the servers accessed during m-commerce transactions and controls the perceivable communication behavior of the terminal towards the servers, maintains the state information and takes care of tight coupling of transactional properties of the computations as well as of security and privacy.