Supporting group-oriented M-commerce Services

Upkar Varshney
Department of CIS

Georgia State University, Atlanta

The emerging mobile services, including mobile commerce, have received
considerable interest among researchers, developers and service providers.
Several mobile services will require group communications among mobile users.
The most efficient way to support this requirement is wireless multicast, where
the information exchange among users is performed and membership of a group is
maintained. To support the group-oriented mobile services, the following steps
are necessary: (a) identifying the multicast requirements of mobile services,
(b) designing network protocols to support multicast requirements, and, (c)
modeling and evaluating these protocols. In this presentation, we will discuss
the requirements of group-oriented mobile services, and show how we have
designed several multicast protocols for dealing with intermittent connectivity
and brief dis-connectivity. We will also discuss how to model and evaluate the
performance of the protocols. We will also discuss several interesting research
problems.

Upkar Varshney is on the faculty of CIS at Georgia State University, Atlanta.
He received a B.E. in electrical engineering in 1988 from the University of
Roorkee (now Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee, IIT-R). Then he received
M.S. in computer science in 1992 and Ph.D. in telecommunications and computer
networking in 1995, both from University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has
authored over 60 papers in wireless networks, mobile commerce, wireless
multicast, and other topics for major journals and international conferences.
Several of his papers are among the most widely cited publications in mobile
commerce. He has delivered over 50 invited speeches, including several keynotes
at conferences and workshops. He has received several teaching awards,
including Myron T. Greene Outstanding Teaching Award (2000) and RCB College
Teaching Award (2002). He has served on program committees of more than 20
international conferences and also has or is currently serving as
editor/guest-editor for IEEE Computer, ACM/Kluwer Journal on Mobile Networks
and Applications (MONET)-special issue on Mobile Commerce, and International
Journal on Mobile Communications.