Self-managing, disconnected processes and mechanisms for mobile e-business

Abstract

With the tremendous advances in hand-held computing and communication capabilities, rapid proliferation of mobile devices, and decreasing device costs, we are seeing a growth in mobile e-business in various consumer and business markets. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and framework for end-to-end mobile e-business applications such as purchasing, retail point of sales, and order management. The design takes into consideration disconnection, application context and failure modes to provide mobile users with seamless and transparent access to commerce and content activities. In our architecture, we consider a novel business process design based on state-machines and event management to handle disconnection and resource limitations. We designed, implemented and deployed a system for mobile e-business on clients integrated with private exchanges and sell-side servers. The e-business framework on mobile clients is implemented based on J2ME and open XML standards. A performance study of simple e-business transactions was done on the client using the above mechanisms and programming environment. We show that the performance of a purchasing process using the framework does reasonably well.