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Upkar Varshney Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
archive
Volume 3 , Issue 3 (August 2003) table of contents
Pages: 236 - 255
Year of Publication: 2003
ISSN:1533-5399

Abstract:
With recent advances in devices, middleware, applications and networking infrastructure, the wireless Internet is becoming a reality. We believe that some of the major drivers of the wireless Internet will be emerging mobile applications such as mobile commerce. Although many of these are futuristic, some applications including user-and location-specific mobile advertising, location-based services, and mobile financial services are beginning to be commercialized. Mobile commerce applications present several interesting and complex challenges including location management of products, services, devices, and people. Further, these applications have fairly diverse requirements from the underlying wireless infrastructure in terms of location accuracy, response time, multicast support, transaction frequency and duration, and dependability. Therefore, research is necessary to address these important and complex challenges. In this article, we present an integrated location management architecture to support the diverse location requirements of m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture is capable of supporting a range of location accuracies, wider network coverage, wireless multicast, and infrastructure dependability for m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture can also support several emerging mobile applications. Additionally, several interesting research problems and directions in location management for wireless Internet applications are presented and discussed.

My Discussion:
Sometimes a paper I select turns out to be really relevant for the UI part of mobile UI interfaces, sometimnes it isn't. This paper does start out by stating that under the nomer "wireless Internet" amongst other concepts "user interfaces" explicitely should be included. The author then proceeds to state that mobile commerce will drive the wireless Internet, survey areas of local commerce that would require location identification, propose an architecture for comprehensive location identification, and not mention how any of this will integrate with the user interface on the device at all. The survey of location-aware mobile commerce applications and the needs they impose on the location identification component are interesting. The acrhitecture proposed less so, because it seems more a statement of which diagram boxes should fit together how in what figure and what their real-world effects should be than an actual solution stating how things should work and how we get there from the current context. But again, the needs this architecture has to fulfill seem to have been crafted without a sentence about what the users and agents in this scheme need to see and be told by their technologies to be made confident enough that their transactions will do what they intend and no more, and that their money and services will be secure and effective, to partake in this mobile commerce. Does the consumer need to see any identifiers in the small-cell local scenario on their device and the location of the service provider? How will opting in actually work without having the user opt in to everything in a square kilometer, or nothing in a tiny area? The paper doesn't say, and doesn't seem to care.