Advances in wireless network technology
and the continuously increasing number of users of hand held terminals make the
latter an ideal channel for offering personalized services to mobile users and
give pace to the rapid development of
e-commerce conducted with portal devices.
As a mobile e-commerce
transaction we define any type of transaction of an economic value that is
conducted trough a mobile terminal that uses a wireless telecommunications
network for communication with the
e-commerce infrastructure. Mobile Electronic Commerce (MEC) refers to
e-commerce activities relying solely or partially on mobile e-commerce
transactions. MEC operates partially in a different environment than E-Commerce
conducted in fixed Internet, due to the special characteristics and constraints
of mobile terminals and wireless networks and the context, situations and
circumstances in which people use their hand-held terminals. MEC has a number
of business, technical and legal implications that are different from
e-commerce in the fixed Internet setting.
Most notably, location-based products and services is a completely new
business, technical, and legal area that is typical of MEC.
MEC becomes interesting with
the huge proliferation of the WWW-based business-to-consumer (b-to-c)
E-commerce in Internet since 1995 and the simultaneous and huge proliferation
of digital wireless telecom networks throughout the world (well, not so vividly
in USA). Around 1995-1996, it became obvious for the telecom infrastructure
providers, such as Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, that bringing together the
earlier separate digital telecom networks and Internet would offer very
attractive business opportunities for the telecom infrastructure and handset
manufacturers and increased value for the telecom customers. Why shall we use
only PC for Internet and mobile terminal for voice traffic only, as the latter
could be used for Internet, too? And maybe solely the mobile handset could be
used to access Internet. The result of these considerations was the Wireless
Application Protocol (WAP) on one hand and TCP/IP+HTTP supporting mobile
handsets like the Nokia 9000 Communicator on the other hand. The latter came to
the market in 1996-1997 (second generation Communicator Nokia 9110, which
became WAP capable, in 1999) (Nokia Products 2000). WAP was developed by the
Wapforum founded in 1997, aiming to develop the wireless Internet-like
standards for digital wireless telecom networks. WAP can be understood as a
kind of thin Web due to its simple Wireless Markup Language (WML) and simple browsers
for the language, as well as a special protocol stack (WAP stack) that suits
better to the wireless environment than the standard TCP/IP+HTTP stack.
WAP plays an important role in
MEC by optimizing Internet standards for the constraints of the wireless
environment and hand held terminals and thus bridging the gap between Internet
and mobile world. Thus, it opens, at least in theory, also the existing
e-commerce infrastructure in Internet for mobile handset users. Furthermore,
WAP creates new business opportunities for players in the field, like device
and infrastructure manufacturers, content and service providers, and for Mobile
Network Operators. The latter can play a more active role and become more
profitable and competitive while providing contents either solely in WML or
both in HTML and WML. Also, the above mentioned location-based services and
products become an attractive business opportunity for the Mobile Network
Operators and contents providers when there is technology in sight that can support
the services.
It is not yet sure how well WAP
(or similar technology in Japan called I-mode) will be able to proliferate.
From our point in this paper the fate of WAP is not essential, because there
are already handsets like the Nokia 9110 Communicator that can be used
perfectly well with or without WAP capabilities to perform mobile e-commerce
transactions and more and more similar handset products are appearing on the
market place. Thus, whether Web or WAP enabled devices are used for MEC, does not
influence much our analysis below.
In this paper, we examine challenges introduced by
MEC. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we
present the characteristics of mobile wireless computing. In Section 3, we
outline how these characteristics along with new usage requirements affect MEC
applications and we then present some distinctive features of MEC applications and
services. In Section 4, we present the main players in MEC, the need for new
business models and the role of the Mobile Network Operator. In Section 5, we present issues at the system
level. Section 6 concludes the paper.
