Implementing an Mobile Agent Platform for M-Commerce

Mobile commerce (M-commerce), the traditional E-commerce combined with mobile devices and wireless networks, is likely to become a major business model in the near future. M-commerce not only extends Internet-based E-commerce, but also offers a unique business opportunity with its own features, such as ubiquity, accessibility, portability, etc. Most E-commerce applications adopt client/server model in which a commercial transaction generally requires a stable communication connection being established between the client and the server. Obviously, this approach poses a barrier to the development of M-commerce applications. In this paper, we propose a mobile agent oriented M-commerce platform. Due to the flexibility and mobility, mobile agent based M-commerce can complement the existing client/server based E-commerce model to enable consumers to conduct business without time and space restrictions. This paper will discuss the design and implementation of an experimental mobile agent platform for M-commerce. Issues to be investigated involve security, service discovery and database access functionalities. The goal of this research is to deploy the mobile agent paradigm for M-commerce applications.