The Design of A Personal and Intelligent Pervasive-Commerce System Architecture

This paper studies the paradigm of pervasive commerce (p-commerce) and presents the design of a p-commerce system architecture which consists of e-commerce servers and store sensors. The architecture includes a personal device, PAM (Pervasive Activity Manager), that allows a user to interact with the smart e-commerce environment. PAM can be used to automatically collect sensor information, manage user preference and context, connect to servers and peers on the Web, conduct service checking and integration, and execute user transactions. Extended from traditional m-commerce devices, PAM is user-centric in the sense that it tries to help a user look for preferred products and find the best result for the user. It proactively conducts many context-aware operations in the background without user's explicit requests. We study the p-commerce system issues and define the capabilities to make such a device feasible. We also show shopping scenarios and present a simple PAM prototype using the PDA device available today