Deployment and performance evaluation of mobile multicoupon solutions

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) represents an important area of business with a huge potential revenue for merchants and great opportunities for customers to achieve better offers. One of the topics within m-commerce that needs important improvements on usability and efficiency is electronic coupon systems. This is because solutions for electronic coupons are focused on their theoretical definition, overlooking both their performance evaluation and their viability analysis. In this paper, we provide an evaluation framework to test multicoupon solutions. Under this framework, we evaluate two particular multicoupon schemes, obtaining interesting performance results, such as the fact that cryptographic operations are not always the most costly processes, as usually claimed by authors of multicoupon schemes. We show that message encoding can help to improve the efficiency of multicoupon solutions, even up to 50% of the overhead over the network. Moreover, we solve other issues related to the viability of these schemes, for example, using a standardized way to distribute non-standard cryptographic key material. Therefore, the viability of a multicoupon solution should be validated considering all involved factors, such as internal processing, networking, message encoding and current technology support.