Organizing and accessing Web services on air

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) refers to the conduct of business using wireless devices and communications. Driven by the success of e-commerce and impressive progress in wireless technologies, m-commerce is rapidly taking place in the business forefront. However, most of the concepts developed for e-commerce may not be easily applicable to wireless environments. This is due to the peculiarities of these environments such as limited bandwidth, unbalanced client-server communication, and limited power supply. Web services are undeniably one of the most significant e-commerce concepts worth of being adapted to the wireless world. Mobile services, also called m-services, promise several benefits compared with their wired counterparts. They provide larger customer base and cater for "anytime and anywhere" access to services. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure for organizing and efficiently accessing m-services in broadcast environments. We define a multichannel model to carry information about m-services available within a given geographic area. The UDDI channel includes registry information about m-services. The m-service channel contains the description and executable code of each m-service. The data channel contains the actual data needed while executing the m-service. We also introduce three techniques to enable efficient access to wireless channels. These techniques extend well-known mobile databases' access methods to m-services: B+ tree, signature indexing, and hashing. We finally present an analytical model and conduct an extensive experimental study to evaluate and compare the proposed techniques.