Mobile commerce: vision and challenges (location and its management)

Mobile computing is distributed computing that involves elements whose location changes in the course of computation. Elements may be software components such as mobile agents or moving objects-data or hardware such as palmtops and wireless phones, or users. This being a very broad definition, the common underlying issue is location and its management. The term mobile computing is very often used for wireless mobile computing-the use of portable devices capable of wireless networking. Wireless mobile computing faces additional constraints induced by the characteristics of wireless communications and the demand for portability. Mobile wireless computing enables access to data at any time and from any place towards the vision of ubiquitous or pervasive computing. This realization of pervasive computing and the imminent maturity of e-commerce are giving, in reality, birth to mobile commerce. This "delivery" comes with new challenges and new opportunities. The opportunities are quite obvious; it is the ability to compute, to commerce and access information from anywhere and at any time.