Managing group membership in ad hoc m-commerce trading systems

Abstract

Managing group membership in an ad hoc m-commerce trading forum is a challenging task as peers may only have partial knowledge of the current membership doe to frequent network disconnections, infrequent participation and delays in communication via intermediaries among them The absence of a centralized network infrastructure adds more complexity to this problem This paper presents a fully distributed and self-organizing approach to managing group membership in such a loose trading community. It is designed to suit the dynamic nature of ad hoc wireless networking and the social characteristics of ad hoc m-commerce.