M-Commerce Perceptual Quality of Service.pdf

M-Commerce Perceptual Quality of Service Marios C. Angelides and Gheorghita Ghinea Department of Information Systems and Computing Brunel University Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3 PH, UNITED KINGDOM angelidesm@, George.Ghinea@brunel.ac.uk Abstract. Motivated by previously identified user perceptual tolerance to vary- ing multimedia Quality of Service (QoS), this paper shows that the Business to Customer (B2C) user experience with mobile commerce (m-commerce) can be enhanced if the underlying mobile communication is subject to certain thresholds of perceptual QoS (PQoS). 1 Introduction A central issue to the acceptance of B2C applications is the one of quality [1][5][8][18] which has two main facets in an m-commerce environment: of perception and of ser- vice. The latter characterises the technical side of computer networking and represents the performance properties that the underlying network is able to provide. The for- mer is a novel term that we use and gives a more complete characterisation of the human side of the m-commerce experience. That QoS impacts upon the success of m-commerce applications is without doubt, as it plays a pivotal role in attracting and retaining customers. Frustrated customers will leave a site if they perceive it as being slow (for instance), causing lost revenue. To compound the topic, mcommerce sites are likely to be compared to the users actual shopping experiences in the physical world and their normal purchasing and browsing interactions in that environment. Whilst the advent of multimedia enhanced m-commerce applications offering, for instance, video footage of merchandise to be bought, will go someway towards alleviating this factor, in a mobile communication environment such applications will have severe constraints put upon them by limited bandwidth, further highlighting the importance of QoS provision mechanisms. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 looks at how QoS issues in m-commerce from the prism of e-commerce