Transactions in m-commerce environments are used to transmit messages and provide atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID). Ensuring ACID or similar properties is
hard to achieve in m-commerce due to the aforementioned limitations of the mobile terminals and frequent disconnections. A mobile transaction is atomic if either all the operations
specified in the transaction are successfully executed or the executed operations are compensated (i.e., their effects deleted). Three types of atomicity can be defined for e-commerce:
money atomicity, goods atomicity, and certified delivery (Tygar, 1996). They can be applied
to mobile environments. Money atomicity states that the m-commerce protocols must guarantee that funds are transferred from one party to another without the possibility of the
creation or destruction of money. Goods atomic protocols are money atomic and should be
able to provide an exact transfer of goods for the money paid. Finally, a certified delivery
protocol should be goods atomic and allow both the merchant and the customer to prove
exactly which merchandise is received if the money is transferred. Ensuring atomicity in mcommerce is a complicated process. Mobile devices may be unreachable or may be unable
to participate completely in the mobile transaction. In addition, atomicity needs to be jointly
handled with security measures.