Abstract
An important and challenging set of issues in mobile computing is the design of architectures and protocols for providing mobile users with integrated Personal Information Services and Applications (PISA), such as personalized news and financial information, and mobile sales and banking. We present a system architecture for delivery of PISA based on replicated distributed servers connected to users via a personal communications services (PCS) network. The PISA architecture takes advantage of many of the basic facilities incorporated in proposed PCS network designs.
We focus on the mobile sales and inventory application as an example of a PISA with a well-defined market segment. We deal with both application-level and infrastructure-level protocols supporting this application. At the application level, we describe a database design and protocol which supports both mobile and stationary salespersons. A key principle behind our design choices is to minimize those aspects which are needed solely to support user mobility. We propose using a site escrow method and reconfiguration protocol for supporting sales transactions, and discuss how mobile salespersons can be accommodated in this scheme. On the infrastructure-level, we discuss how the service profiles of the mobile salespersons can be maintained using a two-level hierarchy of profile databases, and show that a protocol more robust than that used for maintaining their location is needed. We finally present such a protocol for maintaining service profiles.
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© 1995 Bell Communications Research
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Krishnakumar, N., Jain, R. (1995). Mobility Support for Sales and Inventory Applications. In: Imielinski, T., Korth, H.F. (eds) Mobile Computing. The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 353. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_21
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