Location management for mobile commerce applications in wireless Internet environment

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.