Recovery of mobile internet transactions: algorithm, implementation and analysis

Abstract

The increasing popularity of mobile devices and the support of web portals towards performing transactions from these mobile devices has enabled business on the move. However, internet access from mobile devices is expensive and is subject to high rate of disconnections. For a user executing a transaction with a web portal from a mobile device, the disconnection will require him to redo all the steps in the transaction on subsequent reconnection. This paper proposes a recovery scheme to restore the most recent and valid response from the previous session, so that the effort towards rework is minimized. The user, upon reconnection, can continue from the restored response without restarting from the beginning of the transaction. We demonstrate the practicality of the scheme by implementing it in a WAP system. Our results clearly indicate the performance advantages that can be gained from this recovery approach. We also establish the correctness of the scheme using a reasoning framework.