EMPLOYING THE C2C PRINCIPLE FOR MAKING THE USE OF

DATA SERVICES ON MOBILE PHONES MORE ATTRACTIVE

About the introduction of customer-to-customer services

Hans Weghorn

BA-University of Cooperative Education, Rotebühlplatz 41, Stuttgart, Germany

Keywords: Wireless data services, Personalization, Wireless Internet access, Handheld d

evices, QoI, C2C

Abstract: Today, digital mobile phones are still rarely applied for accessing and using data services. Due to their

broad distribution, mobile phones would offer a very attractive platform for information retrieval in

different areas, like, e.g., traffic channels, public transportation, sports, and many others. Unfortunately,

there are limitations, which prevent the average customer from widely using these services: At first, the

costs for data transfers through wireless digital phone networks are extremely high, and on the other hand,

the handling of the devices usually is very uncomfortable. Here, a new system concept is described, which

aims to overcome the before described limitations: In this design, a central service belonging to an

individual customer sources the desired information, e.g. from the open Internet, and prepares it for an

efficient wireless transfer. Through the second part, i.e. the terminal display software running on the mobile

device, the user can retrieve and inspect this information with minimal efforts, because it is automatically

transferred from the sourcing service. On base of this construction, the user interface is simplified, the data

access costs are reduced, and finally the information access speed can be increased. In this approach,

customised information is retrieved through a central client belonging to the customer, and hence, this

construction shall be called C2C (customer-to-customer) service.

1 INTRODUCTION

The acceptance level for data services accessed from

digital mobile phones appears much lower than what

was forecasted during the introduction of these

services several years ago. For instance, at the

moment in Germany below 5% of the phone owners

are using data services at all. Besides psychological

reasons (e.g., unawareness), which could be

overcome by advertisement and marketing

campaigns, there arise two hard problem fields,

which prevent the average customer from

extensively using data services through digital

wireless networks:

1. Costs:

The expense for wireless data transfers

through phone networks is much more expensive

than through landline networks. Typically, this ratio

ranges in the order of 10

, and in addition to that, the

wireless data access rate is considerably lower.

Hence, compared to alternative but related

technologies (e.g., ADSL), the user has to pay much

more for a much weaker service.

2. Usability: The

comfort of handling small

devices like mobile phones appears at the moment as

very limited. Clearly, there are physical limitations

of the devices like small display screens, and

keypads with only digits and some control keys, but

these properties are inherent and partially intended,

because these devices should be lightweight, small,

and should provide long operation time with each

battery charge. In consequence, user interfaces have

to be designed for meeting these restrictions

(Johnson, 1998). For instance, WAP navigation

(www.wapforum.org) was directly inherited from

the idea of WEB navigation on desktop computers

or workstations. The identical use paradigm is

applied in WAP browsing, although the display

device class is completely different. Therefore, one

cannot consider the fact as surprise that the common

user does not extremely favour WAP browsing,

because it requires continuous tree-based navigation

control, which has to be performed with the help of a

fractional keyboard.

From these discussion points, two main

approaches

for an optimization of wireless data

access systems used from mobile phones directly

Weghorn H. (2004).

EMPLOYING THE C2C PRINCIPLE FOR MAKING THE USE OF DATA SERVICES ON MOBILE PHONES MORE ATTRACTIVE - About the introduction

of customer-to-customer services.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on E-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 3-7

 SciTePress

can be deducted: 1. Reduction of the access costs,

and 2. Optimisation of the user handling (UI)

2 CONCEPT OF CUSTOMISED

SERVICES

2.1 Fundamental approach

The first important goal is to reduce the data transfer

costs of the wireless access, and this obviously can

only be achieved, if the transferred data amount

during external communication on the mobile

terminal is minimized.

Considering, e.g., a traffic information system,

which tells the customer, whether there is a traffic

jam on a certain highway or not, the content

information can be described by one bit (yes/no). In

other words, it is sufficient that the mobile device

loads only this single bit of information through the

wireless link from an external service (which still

has to be defined at this point). In contradiction to

this approach, generalized mechanisms like WAP

browsing would require the user to navigate through

a WAP page tree, which consists of a set of pages.

All these WAP pages will accumulate to a total data

size, which has to be transferred and paid for, and

which – due to the XML based coding scheme

(Bradley, 1998) of WAP contents – will be much

bigger than this truly required information amount.

Figure 1: An intermediate information relay translates the

huge data amounts on the open WEB for an efficient

wireless transfer

For properly handling this kind of information

input, the display software needs specific knowledge

about the information retrieval. In addition, a

specific service outside the terminal is required to

deliver exactly this coding (Fig. 1). Parameters have

to be supplied for an operation of the information

service in a manner that it truly can be useful for the

customer: For the traffic channel example, an

important parameter is the targeted highway. For

flexibility, the user on the mobile terminal has to be

able to select the highway, and hence this parameter

has to be communicated to the information service.

Another question to be answered is how the

information service will source its input. For many

application cases, e.g. timetable information on

flights, railways, the information can be sourced

from the open Internet, in particular from the WEB.

For the traffic channel sample many public radio

stations present themselves in WEB sites on the

Internet, and they are providing recent traffic

information as part of their daily business. With this,

the information relay service in Fig. 1 better is

described as intermediate mining agent, which

particularly is constructed according to the given

problem.

Hence, the tasks for the intermediate service can

be summarised:

- Collect source information from different sites

on the Internet (or other appropriate sources)

- Extract the targeted information contents

- Prepare the information packet for minimal

data transfer

- Supply the required control structures for the

remote access from the mobile device

Discussing next the second important goal –

achieving a comfortable handling on the mobile

terminal: For this, personalization can act as solution

key. In particular, a comfortable handling is

achieved, if the user just has to supply only one

single or a few input actions before receiving the

desired response output (e.g. by launching the query

with a hot key press on the terminal). The

information system has to know, without asking for

an explicit input of this, the parameters of the

information query.

The question to be answered then is, how these

parameters are determined. There are different

possible answers: A first straightforward approach is

to make these parameters configurable by the user.

In this case, the terminal software has to be broken

down into to two parts (Fig. 2): One part for entering

the parameters (e.g., for an e-mail retrieval system

the account information, and the server settings),

which intrinsically will be uncomfortable, but which

will be rarely used. And the second part is intended

for daily use, because it launches efficiently the

desired information query. The alternative for the

construction of the configuration part would be a

self-learning system, which asks during the first

invocation for the querying parameters, and after

this automatically generates hot lists, which can be

manually modified / edited / extended by the user.

This kind of parametrization is commonly called

personalization and it is especially feasible for small

mobile devices, because these units are usually

owned and used by only one person. Personalization

is the key for achieving the initial demanded

simplifications of the user handling.

According to the so far described structure, the

Internet relay software, and the terminal display

software have to be closely related. Since this kind

of system delivers customised information contents

by software units belonging to the customer

ICETE 2004 - WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS

him/herself, this kind of construction shall be called

a C2C system. This does not exclude that the

Internet relay can be used by other users

(= customers). For instance students, who want to

share studying course information, may use such a

tool, but this application sample even more

manifests the term C2C (“one customer to many”) as

possible variant, which shows also the close relation

to the meanwhile common terms of B2C and B2B,

for which a company (

business) delivers a service.

Figure 2: Two parts of the terminal software.

2.2 QoI = QoS measure for

information contents

The open Internet, in particular the WEB, can be

used as information mine for many purposes, as also

for the before described information systems with

mobile terminals. Today, many people collect

information from the WEB, but in most cases they

are not aware of the quality of the retrieved content.

For instance traffic information systems often do not

supply the full or accurate information, in many

cases the messages are outdated. Various reasons

can be identified for problems with the quality of

information, for which a new term should be

introduced here: QoI (quality of information) shall

represent an indicator similar to the term QoS, which

is commonly used in networking environments.

The reasons for low QoI values are distinct: As

one sample, traffic channels are often operated by

the help of non-professional personal drivers, who

deliver their observations by phone call: In this

chain there are a couple of error sources.

In contradiction to such system immanent

problems, there exist also samples of intentional

misinformation: For the northern region of the Alps,

it can be traced that certain skiing regions update

their online information (WEB cam pictures,

weather conditions) only if these are attractive. If the

conditions are low, the WEB contents simply are not

updated.

Since the C2C system employs an intermediate

gateway for achieving best performance, this

intermediate unit can additionally be used for

measuring the QoI of the desired content. In some

cases this can be obtained by checking the

consistency from the same WEB site (e. g., sample

on train departure information in [Weghorn, 2004-

1]), in other cases this may be obtained by sourcing

different independent WEB sites providing the same

information contents (e. g. on traffic channels in a

certain country region, compare sample in

[Weghorn, 2004-2]).

2.3 Discussion of the C2C relay

Summarising the design approach, the C2C

information utility can be considered as one unique

software unit. Internally it is constructed as

distributed system in an asymmetric manner: All the

information sourcing efforts as also the sourcing

intelligence are inside the Internet relay part. By

that, minimal software can be achieved on the

terminal device, which is intended for an efficient

and appropriate user interfacing (input controls and

presentation of contents).

Mediator and wrapper systems, which deal with

the transfer of Internet based information to mobile

terminals, were reported earlier (Mahmoud, 2002;

Wang, 2003). Also the idea of size-efficiently

transferring WEB contents to wireless terminals was

discussed already (Weghorn, 2002), but in

contradiction to these considerations, the approach

here goes much further by adding considerable

intelligence to the intermediate instance, specifically

the multi-sourcing and the measuring of QoI.

Particularly coding the intermediate result for a

highly efficient wireless transfer can also not be

compared to the standard compression of

generalised formats (like, e.g., WAP pages).

2.4 Alternatives to WEB accesses for

electronic data sourcing

The WEB offers a valuable source for information

systems, but it should be considered that this not

always is the original access. Traffic information

again yields samples for an alternative electronic

access to the information contents: Traffic channels

traditionally are broadcasted by public radio stations,

and the RDS system (radio digital system exchanges

these text-based messages in parallel to the analogue

audio signal through the same radio frequency air

link) can be used for accessing this information.

Practically, this can be achieved by installing a plug-

in radio receiver in a computer (e.g., PC-similar

system), and operating a scanner on defined stations

for retrieving the various traffic messages. From

EMPLOYING THE C2C PRINCIPLE FOR MAKING THE USE OF DATA SERVICES ON MOBILE PHONES MORE

ATTRACTIVE

there, these messages can be forwarded to the C2C

relay.

As other example, airports traditionally publish

the departure and arrival tables through public TV,

through the so-called teletext (or video text)

contained especially in regional TV broadcast

channels. These can be accessed electronically by a

RF receiver unit, which is plugged into a computer.

This kind of extension hardware is also available

since many years on the consumer market.

Hence, for certain information systems, the

WEB mining may replaced or combined with

alternative methods, but these will again require a

very specific solution for the addressed problem.

3 TECHNICAL POSSIBILITIES

FOR IMPLEMENTATIONS AND

C2C SAMPLE SYSTEMS

For implementing the C2C Internet relay, common

WEB technologies can be applied. These are

scripting languages like Perl or PHP, or compiled

languages like JAVA servlets (Bell, and Parr, 2002).

Developing software for mobile terminals like

GSM phones, long time was restricted to the device

manufactures themselves. Fortunately, a couple of

years ago Sun company came up with the approach

to bring JAVA development to these small devices

(which was the original aim for the introduction of

the JAVA language), and a reduced JAVA version

was defined, which was named JAVA micro edition

(= J2ME), and which was intended for devices with

low resources in respect to CPU computing power

and memory (Piroumian, 2002). Hence, one

possibility today for implementing the described

terminal software is to use J2ME, especially because

it was defined with HTTP networking capabilities

(Knudsen, 2002) from its first definition.

Recently, devices from different manufactures

were introduced, which are based on the open

operating system Symbian (www.symbian.com).

Hence, it is today also possible to develop terminal

software with other standard programming

languages, like, e.g., C++, for a series of different

terminal devices.

In the second year of our studying course for

applied computer science, J2ME was offered as one

of the selectionable lectures. More than 50 % of the

students decided 2003 for this teaching content,

which consisted of eight theory-lecturing hours for

an introduction, and a practical development work of

a C2C system in teams with two students each. For

this assessment project a total workload of 60 hours

was scheduled.

The teams could select from a defined list of

C2C information systems: E-Mail access, railway

departure information, traffic channel on highways,

public transportation information, situation in skiing

arenas in the Alps, and remote chess playing with a

powerful computer. The very useful C2C tool on

traffic information is described in more technical

detail in (Weghorn, 2004-2).

Meanwhile approx. thirty C2C systems were

developed, for cost reasons and for providing

defined conditions most of these with plain

simulation of the terminal device. But around ten

projects were also tested on true devices – GSM

mobile phones – and it was shown that the concept

was applicable. Of course, since these small projects

were intended as training a first implementation, not

all the defined and desired features were obtained in

each system, but in sum over all these projects, all

the before claimed advantageous features could be

achieved.

One server machine has been reserved for these

C2C systems to make these services permanently

available on the WEB. A special server was set up

also to achieve a short WEB access path name from

the wireless terminal, and to prevent any

interference with the regular IT infrastructure of our

University. Currently, it is being discussed, whether

there is interest among the students for

investigations of the usability of the C2C systems. In

this case, we can expect results of this future

research by next year.

4 CRITICAL ASPECTS

The C2C relay is very important for achieving all the

targeted benefits out of the proposed system. An

average customer – in contradiction to a student at a

University with IT scope – will have the problem,

where and how to operate this service. Nevertheless,

technically skilled persons can use WEB providers,

who include server mechanisms in addition to the

plain presentation of WEB contents and e-mail

services, which are already widely available since

several years.

Another barrier will be the installation of the

terminal software on the mobile device, which again

requires technical knowledge and partially even

special equipment.

The system could be simplified for the end

customer by using WAP or direct WEB / Internet

accesses from the terminal software. This would

grow the terminal software without making it less

comfortable. The benefit of overcoming the

intermediate C2C relay would consequence a higher

price for the data transfer costs. At the moment, the

ICETE 2004 - WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS

best trade off on this all is determined by the

technical knowledge of the customer.

In our projects it is also like that each

information system is coded individually. This was

required for lecturing and training purposes, but it is

not a feasible approach for professional systems. A

generic framework for constructing C2C systems

would be desirable, but this would require additional

elaborated concepts.

5 CONCLUSIONS

As described, the C2C concept can offer the user of

information systems on mobile terminals several

important benefits: A simplified handling, a faster

access speed, and a reduction of costs for

information. The approach was specifically

developed with the aim to small, physically very

limited terminal devices, like digital hand held

phones. Furthermore, it is mainly intended for

personal or business information retrieval like traffic

channels or departure information on railway trains.

As seen from the many implementations, which

were conducted so far in our University, the

development effort for such C2C systems is

relatively high, because currently there is no generic

approach available. Hence, the scope of future work

on C2C can be – after evaluating the acceptance

level of this idea from the end customers’ point of

view – to develop generator systems for such C2C

information tools. Another research direction may be

to use beside the WEB mining the described

alternatives provided by public radio and TV for

improving the overall QoI of the C2C information

systems.

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EMPLOYING THE C2C PRINCIPLE FOR MAKING THE USE OF DATA SERVICES ON MOBILE PHONES MORE

ATTRACTIVE