Supporting dependable group‐oriented mobile transactions: redundancy‐based architecture and performance

Abstract

AbstractSeveral of the emerging mobile commerce services, such as mobile auctions, mobile financial services, and multi‐party interactive games, will require support for dependable transactions. This is a difficult challenge because of both intermittent connectivity and potential failures in wireless infrastructure. In this paper, we present a multi‐network access‐based wireless architecture and related protocols to support dependable transactions. The key idea is to allow group users to utilize access to one or more wireless networks to complete different steps of a transaction. This allows for transactions to be completed even under time‐ and location‐dependent connectivity problems and network failures. The performance results show that access to multiple wireless networks leads to very high transaction completion probability even when individual wireless networks do not offer continuous and/or highly available access. The transaction completion probability is found to be dependent on the group size and number of steps in a transaction, and the same level of dependable performance for transactions can be achieved by increasing the number of wireless networks or improved access to individual networks. The overhead for multi‐network access can be further reduced by creating preferred wireless networks and by reducing the number of critical users in different transaction stages. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.