Addressing location issues in mobile commerce

Mobile commerce is an emerging area involving applications, mobile devices, middleware, and wireless networks. The applications may include mobile financial services, user and location specific mobile advertising, mobile inventory management, wireless business reengineering, and mobile interactive games. One important requirement of these applications is the support for location tracking of products, services, devices, and people. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting: (a) the location requirements of the emerging M-commerce applications; (b) how these could be supported by the existing and emerging wireless networks; and (c) a new methodology to model M-commerce applications using a generic M-commerce application to evaluate the location management overhead of various M-commerce applications.