Design of a Mobile Client for the AIDA Auction Service

We show the main characteristics of both the AIDA auction service and a client for that service running on a mobile device. The AIDA system supports responsive and available auction services in a large scale distributed environment, such as the Internet. The AIDA service allows for fast evolving auctions on the In- ternet. In this paper we present the main architectural challenges to implement a mobile client for AIDA. We propose the design of a client that can run on a mobile device, such as a smartphone. Moreover, our system provides the auctioneers with a simple mechanism to switch between computing platforms, such as mobile devices and desktop computers. The auctioneer can switch between several devices as long as those those can exchange a single and small file. I. INTRODUCTION These years the auction services over the Internet are gaining increasing popularity, e.g. WWW.EBAY.COM and WWW.AMAZON.COM. Commonly, the duration of those auc- tions has an order of magnitude of several days. This char- acteristic is a consequence of the asynchronous nature of the Internet, based on a best-effort communication service (1)-(4). Additionally, it seems that the current Internet-based auction services rely, in general, on centralized architectures that are prone to scalability and availability drawbacks. Server's overloading may occur, if an arbitrary large number of users concurrently access the service. In absence, or insufficient, server replication, a failure can halt the system, or deteriorate its performance. The most common Internet auctions, i.e. those that end at a predefined time, exhibit an interesting users behavior, called last-minute bidding (5): the users tend to submit their bid as close as possible to the end of the auction, reducing the probability that someone else might submit a better bid. This phenomenon exacerbates the scalability requirements of the auction system. Owing to the above observations, we proposed an ar- chitecture for supporting auction services over the Internet that is based on replicated services across a number of servers distributed over this network. The architecture, named AIDA (Architecture for Internet-based Distributed Auctions), is based on both hierarchical lightweight communications, and coordinator-cohort computation (6). Our architecture offers advantages with respect to both the auction service provider and to the user. Specifically, from the service provider perspective, our distributed architectures can accommodate an arbitrary number of users by balancing the work load among all the servers implementing the auction service. From the user perspective, our architecture can support a responsive auction service, provided that the client is bound to the "most responsive" server, i.e. the server with the lower sum of workload and congested path to the client. Moreover, the auctions implemented with AIDA could be "fast", i.e. could have a duration of few minutes. This characteristic is currently uncommon in the Internet auctions. We believe that a mobile client to AIDA could be very effective for the users. Since the auctions serviced by AIDA can last for few minutes, a bidder might need a readily available device to participate on time. A further issue that arises with a mobile client is the possibility for a user to switch between devices. A bidder might need to migrate from a device to another in order to continue to participate to the auction. In this Paper we present the main architectural challenges to implement a mobile client for AIDA, mainly due to the soft- ware limitations of current smartphones. In our current imple- mentation of the AIDA system we used the Java programming language, version 1.5, which is not actually available for top- end smartphones.