Transactional Database Accesses for M-Commerce Clients

Abstract

Advances in wireless communication technologies in the past decade have led to the emergence of e-commerce applications that can be executed on mobile handheld devices. A major class of this new type of applications, commonly known as mobile e-commerce or m-commerce applications, relies on access to one or more database servers. Although conventional database technologies can still serve for applications in this evolving context, some of the techniques need to be adapted to the new environment to take advantage of the characteristics of the mobile environment or to combat the inherent limitations in such an environment. This chapter explores the appropriate mechanisms to be supported by database servers in the mobile environment and the generic architecture that can suit such a need. In particular, we focus our discussion on an important class of database applications, namely, transaction processing, which ensures the atomicity and other desirable correctness criteria of the database accessing activities. Furthermore, the concept of transaction processing is generalized to encompass accessing multiple databases while staying within the context of a mobile computing platform. A generic architecture that supports the necessary features is described. Relevant issues on the broadcast database and the disconnected processing of transactions are also considered.