Context-Aware Mobile Services Transactions

Abstract

With the ubiquity of handheld devices people can now access information and conduct online transactions virtually anywhere and anytime. In such flexible but less reliable environment transaction management technology is believed to provide service reliability and data consistency. Existing models developed for mobile transactions mainly focus on variation of conventional commit procedures and give little or no attention to the context-awareness which has become a crucial part of modern mobile applications. Given the high availability of context-aware services, mobile transactions should not only acquire required services but should also comply with the service context. This paper exploits the service-oriented computing technology and accordingly proposes a novel approach that manages transactions using the contextual information of mobile services. The proposed approach has several advantages. It manages transactions such that they adapt to the required service context as well as user's needs. It also ensures the reliability of transactions and also increases their resilience to failures.