M-commerce, technological
perspective
Prof. Dr. Jari Veijalainen
Univ. of Jyväskylä
Finland
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Presentation Outline
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•
•
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Introduction
Convergence phenomena
Requirements for Mobile E-Commerce
Business Models andTransactional
Requirements
• Conclusions
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Acknowledgements for the
coauthors: talk based in part on
• Tsalgatidou, Aphrodite; Veijalainen, Jari & Pitoura, Evaggelia.
Challenges in Mobile Electronic Commerce. Paper in IeC
2000, 3rd International Conference on Innovation through ECommerce, November 14th-16th, 2000, Manchester UK.
• Tsalgatidou, Aphrodite & Veijalainen, Jari. Requirements for
Mobile E-Commerce. Paper presented in eWork and eBusiness
Conference, Madrid, Spain, 18-20 October 2000. Published in
Stanford-Smith, Brian & Kidd, Paul T. (eds.) E-Business: Key
Issues, Applications and Technologies. IOS Press. 2000. pp
1037-1043.
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Introduction
– Mobile e-commerce (MEC) is linked with
wireless Internet and proliferation of Internetready telecom terminals (GSM,I-mode)
– the estimates on the number of Internet-ready
telecom handsets by 2003 on the market vary
from 134 millions (Strategy Analyst) to 330
millions (IGI Consulting)
– in a few years the number of Internet-ready
handsets exceeds the number of stationary
terminals (PCs) in the world
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Introduction
• The prerequisites for mobile e-commerce
– global backbone network based on IP called
commonly „Internet“ (whatever it means)
– WWW-technology with HTML and HTTP,
soon cheap/free browsers and WWW servers,
and later Java, Javascript, applets and servlets
– Business-to-customer e-commerce based on
WWW technology and home computers =>
already a huge potential customer base
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Introduction
– wireless digital voice communication networks,
esp. GSM networks that support global roaming
– Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
development (since 1997) whose goal it is to
facilitate access from wireless telecom network
terminals to Internet, i.e. to make the wireless
terminals „Web-enabled“ (Nokia, Ericsson etc.)
– one application class in these „Web-enabled“
telecom terminals is e-commerce ; hence
mobile e-commerce or „m-commerce“ MEC
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Mobile e-commerce (or mcommerce or MEC)
– We assume that there is the e-commerce
infrastructure on Internet (and/or on telecom
network) and that it can be accessed through
mobile portable terminals (e.g. over WAP)
– M-commerce transaction: Any type of
transaction of an economic value having at least
at one end a mobile terminal and thus using the
telecommunications network for
communication with the e-commerce
infrastructure
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Mobile e-commerce (or mcommerce or MEC)
– Mobile e-commerce = e-commerce based on
m-commerce transactions
– MEC is thus Internet-based e-commerce
performed using mobile portable (telecom)
terminals + all location-related commercial
activities
– the location-related activities are the unique
feature of MEC, because they make much sense
for mobile terminals but no sense for stationary
terminals
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Networks: Why several digital
network technologies?
– IP network was developed primarily for data
transfer between heterogeneous computer
networks (IP = Internet Protocol)
• packet -oriented
• no firm end-to-end delivery guarantees=> real time
streams (voice, video) suffer from problems
– GSM network was developed primarily for
digital wireless voice transmission
• connection oriented, firm-end-to end delivery
guarantees, wireless link transfer capacity: voice
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Networks: Why several digital
network technologies?
– The original GSM specification contained
connection-oriented circuit-switched data
(CSD) and short messages a´ 160 characters
(SMS) as vehicles to digital data transfer
– especially CSD makes interoperability between
IP-networks and GSM networks possible; but a
high-end terminal with application and
keyboard like Communicator is needed for that
purpose (Nokia 9000 on the market 1996-1997)
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Networks: Why several digital
network technologies?
– both GSM and IP networks are global
networks, but IP networks have much more
potential to become global back-bone networks,
than any special-purpose network, because they
suit better to all traffic types=> development is
going towards „ALL-IP“ networks both in
voice, as well as TV networks
– GSM networks (and other special purpose
networks) can only adopt the role of an access
network towards Internet; how long?
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Networks: „All-IP“ vision
• Access
PC
PC
TV
set
CA
server
IP Backbone
Network
Community
server
Mobile
terminal
Mobile NW
Operator
sphere
E-commerce
server
Service provider
server
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Some measures for the big
picture
• there are about 700 GSM networks in 171
countries on earth
• the number of digital telecom handsets will soon
exceed 1 billion (this year 400 million handsets
will be sold) and by 2005 perhaps 2 billions
• of these hundred of millions are Internet-enabled(
WWW or WAP)
• There are (tens of ) millions of servers at the
server side
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Networks: All-IP vision: what
follows?
– For what reason and for how long will we have
other networks than IP-networks and other
network terminals than IP-terminals?
– Wireless and wireline technologies require
different kind of hardware and software=>
wireless and wireline terminals will differ
– IP network (IPv4) do not support as
automatically and globally roaming as cellular
telecom networks (GSM) do=> the latter can
live
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Networks: All-IP vision: what
follows?
– mobility of people requires small and light terminals
that are wireless; this is not true for wireline
terminals=> differencies in processor capacity, memory
capacity, displays persist
– wireline networks have and will have in the future
magnitudes more of transfer capacity than wireless
networks => the class of applications that can be run on
wireless terminals is smaller than that runnable in
stationary terminals, like PCs
– After Sept. 11th, 2001 it is questionable whether there
should be only one huge backbone due to the total
dependability and vulnerability
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Networks: All-IP vision: what
follows?
– One should further keep in mind that the class
of applications runnable in both portable and
stationary terminals becomes larger with
increasing processor, memory and data transfer
capacity=> some applications that can today
only be run in stationary workstations, can
possibly be run in the future in wireless
portable terminals due to continuous increase in
processor & memory capacity of the handsets
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Networks: All-IP vision: what
follows?
– it is currently open, which applications belong
to which class at which time
– our claim is that e-commerce applications on
portable wireless devices belong to such
applications that remain different from wireline
e-commerce applications, i.e. they exhibit and
will exhibit differences to wireline applications
– and this is independent of whether the
terminals become IP-enabled or not
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What follows? Open Mobile
Alliance: global meta-system
designer
• In order to stop fragmentation of content
formats, business models and terminal
capabilities Nokia has called for Open
Mobile architecture
• This was launched at Comdex in Nov. 2001
• Major players including Japanese
companies have agreed to join
• see www.openmobilealliance.org
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Open Mobile Alliance: Charter
• Deliver responsive and high-quality open
standards and specifications based upon
market and customer requirements
• Establish centers of excellence for best
practices and conduct interoperability testing
(IOT), including multi-standard interoperability
to ensure seamless user experience
• Create and promote common industry view
on an architectural framework
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Open Mobile Alliance: Charter
• Be the catalyst for the consolidation of
standards fora; working in conjunction
with other existing standards
organizations and groups such as IETF,
3GPP, 3GPP2, W3C, JCP
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Open Mobile Alliance: Principles
• Products and services are based on open,
global standards, protocols and interfaces
and are not locked to proprietary technologies
• The applications layer is bearer agnostic
(examples: GSM, GPRS, EDGE, CDMA,
UMTS)
• The architecture framework and service
enablers are independent of Operating
Systems (OS)
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Open Mobile Alliance: Principles
• Applications and platforms are
interoperable, providing seamless
geographic and inter-generational
roaming
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Some concrete convergence
phenomena
• protocol stacks in terminals and servers
– TCP/IP + HTTP
– Special WAP Stack fading?
• Content formats
– WAP 2.0:
– XHTML,
– XML-family for as many as possible content types,
including vector maps (GML)
– For images, video, audio special purpose formats
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Functional convergence on PTDs
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Roaming
heterogeneity:overcoming it on
all levels
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Technical enablers
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3 Requirements
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Requirements: Invariants for the
portable wireless terminals
• These outlook of these terminals is
determined by two conflicting factors
– maximal portability => small physical
dimensions, lightness (ca 100-200 g, fits into
pocket, can be carried easily, one gadget)
– maximal usability=> large display, big and
heavy battery, large enough keyboard for
writing, big enough to be used as phone,
powerful radio/processor, big memory
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Requirements: Invariants for the
portable wireless terminals
• Claim:
– portability does not increase substantially
below the pocket size and ca 100 g (or do
women disagree?) but usability suffers
– portability of two gadgets is worse than that of
one integrated device, 3 is worse than 2 etc.=>
– the terminals will converge towards the above
dimensions and usability increases due to the
faster, smaller technologies within these limits
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Requirements: Invariants for the
portable wireless terminals
– Further, the claim holds even if UI technologies
would be totally replaced by new ones (voice
interface instead of keyboard, hologram display
etc.), or batteries would store 10 or 100 times
more energy/cm3 as the current ones, because
each of the factors increasing the usability
alone sets a lower limit for the size and/or
weight and it is highly improbable that all
factors would radically change
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Issues to be considered in Applications for
Mobile E-Commerce
Small screen,low pixel
resol,UI,restricted I/O
limited mem.&storage
capacity &comp.power,
Communication autonomy
• The characteristics of hand held terminals
• The peculiarities of the wireless environment
• The vulnerability of hand-held devices and
enhanced hostility
Lower bandwidth
C-autonomy,
less connection
stability
• The different usage of hand-held devices
–
–
–
–
–
conditions of usage,
locality,
personalisation,
instantaneous delivery,
micropayment, etc.
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Classification of Requirements
• Usability Requirements
• Requirements for New Applications and Services
• Security Requirements
• Quality of Service and other non-functional
Requirements
• Transactional Requirements
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Usability Requirements
• Simple User Interface
• User friendly payment schemes
• Advanced security mechanisms
• Immediate delivery of the required service/info
• Real time information
• Ubiquity (Anywhere, anytime)
• Unified messaging and intelligent notification
• Optimized service settings
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Requirements for New Applications
and Services
• Location-Based products and Services is a
completely new business, technical and legal area
that is typical of MEC.
– Where am I? Where is X? Where is the nearest X?
– effective representation according to user’s cultural
location
– ...
• Personalized Information and Services
– personalized location based services
– personal information management
– ...
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Security Requirements
• Authentication and non-repudiation, Integrity,
Confidentiality, Message Authentication
– techniques like the asymmetric cryptographic algorithm are used to
achieve these results together with a Certification Authority and a PKI
• Three different security techniques are used for hand-held
devices:
– Smarttrust type solution, where the PKI private key is on the SIM card
(Sonera) and it is used for authentication and non-repudiation
– Authentication and other security mechanisms incorporated into the
software and hardware of the terminal, so that the terminal has a
credit card capability (Nokia, Merita, Visa)
– Terminals with a reader for credit cards (Motorola+Mastercard)
• On going work, e.g. Mobile Transactions (MET) Initiative (Ericsson,
Nokia, Motorola), Wap Identity Model (Wim) in WAP 1.2 which enables a
WAP server to validate a mobile phone before allowing payment
• Peer-To-Peer protocol (see MeT pages)
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QoS & other non-functional requirements
• QoS: response time, bandwidth, latency, loss rates...
• Reliability
• Billing
– Where, When, How, How much, For what, How money is distributed?
– Customer pays for
• The mobile connection service: connection time based, transaction based,
session based, a combination of the above
• The acquired products/content/service
– Billing Requirements - a variety of models should be available:
• event-based billing, service-based billing, area and time based billing, QoS
billing, fixed price per month, low monthly rate+extras, partly billing,
unified billing, a combination of the above
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Transactional Requirements
• Transactional mechanisms for security at both ends
• Transaction Protocols for dispute handling, handling
adversarial attacks
• Security level to be specified by customer
• Failure resiliency and capacity to recover “crashed”
processes into a consistent state
• Transactional mechanisms should
– not assume continuous connection and communication (Cautonomy, loss of field, battery dies)
– take into account that processes may run several days or
weeks at the merchants side
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Research Issues
– Content formats for different channels
– Adaptation of contents based on channel charactersitcis
– Mapping of contents from one sense to another (visionhearing)
– Moving profiles
– Location-aware and –dependent computing
– Different location-related contents (maps)
– Mobile commerce, roaming heterogeneity, global-local
service discovery
– Social and psychological issues
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– Business model issues
Research Issues
• From data management point of view
– Storage and retrieval of XML content and its
adaptation to channels
– Compression of content
– Security issues esp. related with mobility
– Transactions for M-commerce tied with
security
– Metadescriptions of contents and channel
mappings
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Open Issues and Conclusions
• Need for a new requirements model appropriate
for the digital economy in general and Mobile ECommerce in particular
• Need for applications and services with pertinent
content and functionality
• Easier accessibility of applications and services
– at the moment heavily dependent on operator, gateway,
terminal type, location ...
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Open Issues and Conclusions
(cont.)
• Open Accessibility of portals offered by mobile
network operators
• Allow direct contact to other portals without
restricting customer’s options
• Offering portal services to roaming customers
– Service discovery
• Solve open billing issues, e.g.
– Billing of roaming customers
– Billing of not received services
• Language issues (natural language)
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Open Issues and Conclusions
(cont.)
• New Business Models that take into account
business core competencies
• Resolution of Open Legal issues
• Synergy between mobile application platform
providers, content providers and aggregators,
mobile network operators and service providers
• Open Mobile Software Alliance (OMA):addresses
roaming heterogeneity and application
interoperability
• www.openmobilealliance.org
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