Ubiquitous, Mobile and Pervasive Services: A Multicast Strategy for Consistent Data Distribution in M-Commerce

Abstract

The growing demand for wireless technology and related applications has impelled companies to invest profoundly in a wide range of wireless products such as laptops, notebooks, cellular phones, etc., to meet needs of broad range of customers’ requirements while maintaining high efficiency and data integrity. The Mobile Customers (MC) should be able to access the desired information such as news, weather reports, traffic updates, financial information, stock prices, etc. whenever and wherever they desire, but it is possible that they may have inconsistent data as they are not physically connected to the servers and hence they maintain a local cache that stores some amount of data that has been sent by the server. They may also prefetch data from the server for caching, depending on history for future use. The cached data should be consistent with the data in the data server in order to correctly serve the user. The critical constraints of a mobile device like limited network bandwidth, low battery power and low processing power of mobile devices make them more susceptible to inconsistencies. Broadcasting is the natural method for disseminating information in media: namely, shared Ethernet, optical networks, short-range wireless and wireless links, including satellites. It has the highest priority to disseminate information on the wireless network. Multicasting supports an enormous range of applications within a network and is an effective method to guarantee scalability of bulk data transfer in wireless environment. In a Multicast scenario, a single source sends data items, which are then replicated within the network infrastructure to reach a large client population (group). Therefore, it can be used to guarantee scalability, reliable data dissemination, timely and consistent content distribution.