Automating negotiation for M-services

Mobile electronic commerce (m-commerce) is an emerging manifestation of Internet electronic commerce that bridges the domains of Internet, mobile computing and wireless telecommunications in order to provide an array of sophisticated services (m-services) to mobile users. To date, much of the research in the area has concentrated on the problem of service discovery. However, once a service has been discovered, it needs to be provisioned according to the goals and constraints of the service provider and the service consumer. Since, in general, these will be different stakeholders (with different aims), the de facto provisioning method will be some form of negotiation. To this end, this paper develops automated negotiation protocols and strategies that are applicable in m-commerce environments. Specifically, we develop and evaluate time-constrained bilateral negotiation algorithms, that allow software agents to adapt to the quality of the network and/or their experience of similar interactions.