M-Stock: Efficient Stock Monitoring for Mobile Users
Contents
1. e System Timers used for scheduling the tasks and running the application in the background 24 7 e System 1O Ports for creating serial ports and listening to the ports from any incoming or received information coming through the serial ports GSM modem is connected to port com1 e MySql Data MySqIClient used to open a connection the Mysql database server database and retrieve the needed information by executing SQL queries The C application is running 24 7 and is continuously monitoring the database The alert parameters set by the user are continuously checked against the real time values retrieved from the stock market that are stored in the database If a match is found then an SMS alert will be sent accordingly to the user s mobile phone number stored in the database Thereafter the alert information shall be deleted from the database when the SMS is delivered successfully B Charts Feature One of the proposed features of the proposed design was to allow the user to retrieve a chart containing stock information monitored through the past 7 days First this proposed feature was to be implemented in a similar manner to the SMS feature Hence the user selects a stock and requests the chart Thereafter the user s request shall be forwarded to the server that in turn pulls the stock information during the past seven days and plots the chart accordingly The plot shall be then sent back as an MMS message to the user Sendi2. market Experimental results show the significant reduction achieved in exchanged packet size transmission delay and costs Future work includes expanding the application to cover international financial markets testing the system with brokerage systems and porting the application to run not only on Symbian OS but also Windows CE in order to support PDAs in addition to mobile phones REFERENCES 1 Abu Dhabi Securities Market ADSM Available at http www adsm ae B Yuksekkaya A Kayalar M Tosun M Ozcan A Alkar A GSM Internet and Speech Controlled Wireless Interactive Home Automation System JEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics Vol 52 No 3 August 2006 Dubai Financial Market DFM Available at http www dfm ae Eclipse Available at http www eclipse org Ethereal Network Analyzer v0 99 Available at http www ethereal com HSL Mobile Messaging Advanced Services SMS Gateway HTTP Interface For Sending amp Receiving SMS Revision 4 October 2004 7 Huawei VAS SDK User Manual Huawei Technologies Co Ltd 2003 8 J Ellis and M Young JSR172 J2ME Web Services Specification white paper version 1 0 2004 9 JAVA Tutorial Available at http java sun com 10 Java Community Process JSR 000118 Mobile Information Device Profile 2 1 Maintenance Release May 2006 11 J2ME Polish v1 2 4 Available at http www j2mepolish org 12 M Jode Programming Java 2 Micro Editi
3. user This approach hence is much faster convenient and more cost efficient If the MMS approach was used the user had to subscribe to MMS service The user had to bear the delay until the MMS message is received On the server side continuously running an MMS application that keeps monitoring the database for user requests would overload the system Last but not least the system had to bear a higher cost by maintaining the GPRS connection and delivering the MMS messages to the customers Below is a sample screen shot of a requested chart Figure 3 Example of chart displayed on M Stock IV SYSTEM TESTING A Server Testing The testing for the server was done by accessing the server modules by sending HTTP requests using the internet browsers mimicking mobile side requests in a sequence of actions that looks like a regular user 4 13 The test was done from 3 PC s sending one request per second The result of that test was successful and the server was able to satisfy all the requests The server was able to satisfy the test because Apache creates a mutex that serializes the requests as processes and provides resources for them in sequence B Application Testing The application testing was conducted to check the ease of use for any new customer It was found that M Stock is a handy and easy to use device even without any introduction to the application On the other hand we checked the cost of creating a new profile setti
4. M Stock Efficient Stock Monitoring for Mobile Users Fadi Aloul Assim Sagahyroon Nancy Salem Omar Al Omar Sahar Shehada Department of Computer Engineering American University of Sharjah UAE Abstract In today s 24x7 business world there is an increasing reliance on technology to support the core business functions With this reliance comes a growing acceptance for any technology to maintain continuity of business operations and even something more is always required M Stock was designed to provide a real time mobile scheme to guarantee continuity of business operations i e on the run access to the stock exchanges This paper guides the readers through the design and implementation stages of M Stock a mobile application for stock market users M Stock was designed as an enhanced alternative to costly GPRS connections for stock market users The system grants real time monitoring of stock information through a user friendly and easy to use GUI with a plenty of useful features I INTRODUCTION During the early 1990s stock exchange transactions were done using the phone through brokers Using phones introduced many inconveniences due to long waiting times and busy lines Moreover the availability of the customer monitoring the stocks on the spot was a necessity to perform the transactions Later on and as internet use grew widely stock markets users shifted to performing their transactions live online Despite t
5. PS connections V PREVIOUS WORK Pocket X Stock Monitor 16 is one of the commercial products available in the market that is much similar to the proposed design However there are some differences in implementation and features These are explained in Table 3 VI CONCLUSIONS Current mobile phones can only view mobile accessible websites that offer stock information Mobile users are forced to download the complete content of the website which is likely to include unused information Given that most stock prices are continuously changing downloading the stock information can be inconvenient since GPRS is known to be expensive and slow Furthermore many brokerage and financial markets do not offer mobile accessible websites We propose a mobile application to efficiently monitor and trade stocks The application consists of a client placed on the mobile phone that connects to a server via GPRS or Bluetooth or WiFi The server connects to the financial markets via the web collects the latest stock information filters out unnecessary information and stores it in a local database Stock information is sent by the server to the client whenever the client requests it The sent information is efficiently encoded to reduce the packet size speed up the transmission and reduce the telecommunication costs This approach allows the client to collect stock information from any website The application is tested using the UAE financial
6. educed M Stock was designed to meet the needs of the stock market customers The application provides its users with a plenty of valuable features e The application has easy to use GUI with the capability of creating editing deleting portfolios that store the user preferences of stocks and prices e Portfolio information retrieval is done through o GPRS The connection cost in this case is reduced to a minimum since only those few bytes requested by the user will be downloaded to the mobile phone o Bluetooth The mobile application connects to the internet through Bluetooth with the aid of special software downloaded to the mobile phone and the Bluetooth server The connection cost is totally eliminated o WiFi A feature available for smart 3G mobile phones having a WiFi adapter The application in this case directly routes the connection through WiFi hence totally eliminating the cost e User can set alerts and receive an SMS when a stock price hits a specified target e User can retrieve a chart for selected stock containing stock information for the past seven days e Information retrieval is automatically updated according to the refresh rate minutes set by the user e A secured connection using HTTPS protocol to prevent information fraud The paper is organized as follows Section II provides a general overview of the system including its connections and components Section III describes the application features The sy
7. er portfolios and alerts The package has a set of functions to add modify delete records from the record store We made use of these functions to create edit delete portfolios alerts and store them on the user s device Shown below is the application features hierarchy 1 0 Mobile Stock_X 1 1 Main Menu 1 1 1 1 1 2 Create new profile View profiles 1 1 2 1 View profile details stocks prices selected and stored Edit profile details Delete profile Retrieve profile information 1 1 2 5 Back to main menu 1 1 2 6 Exit application 1 3 Set alerts 1 1 4 View alerts 1 1 4 1 View alert details 1 1 4 2 Delete alert 1 1 4 3 Back to main 1 1 4 4 Exit Get charts 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 4 1 1 5 B 3 Database The server uses a MySQL database MySQL is an open source relational database management system which uses Structured Query Language SQL MySQL was chosen because of its reliability speed and flexibility The server hence first receives the URL from the application tokenizes the user requests and issues the appropriate SQL statement to perform the required action and store information accordingly in the database IHI APPLICATION FEATURES A Alert Feature A Siemens tc35i GSM modem is used to implement the SMS alerts Feature The modem is connected to the web server The GSM modem was programmed to send the SMS alerts using a C application 2 6 7 14 We chose C language as it contains many useful libraries like
8. f a dynamically generated PHP page The mobile device then is responsible for reading the PHP page stream and displaying it in proper format 15 For the requests that do not require any response for instance creating a portfolio the SQL query is formulated merely to insert the URL processed information into the database data as required An example is shown in Figure 2 Database Web server Z Z hitp 127 00 l mstockx php act2 amp st mkt_name Request2 i f q DFM_ACICO DFM_Du DFM_Emaar etc Response 2 Database Web server os http 127 0 0 1 mstockx php act 3 Request 3 y I Bid offer volume high low etc Response 3 d 2 a Database Web server D Database Web server http 127 0 0 1 mstockx php act l Request 1 i DFM ADSM Response 1 6 tip 127 0 0 1 mstockx php ac t5 amp id x amp st stocks amp inf prices Request 4 Profile created successfully alert Response 4 Figure 2 An example showing the exchanged packets between the web server and the mobile client B System Components The system consists of 3 components which are described in the following sections B 1 Server The server functions were implemented using PHP scripts 15 The default PHP libraries were used in addition to the JP Graph add on libraries The combination of the default libraries and the libraries from JP Graph were sufficient to implement all of the functions in the defined protocol The server is the hardcore of t
9. he fact that this shift has reduced the inconveniences of using the phone the customer still had to be locked to his her desk monitoring the stock market online to perform the transaction Nowadays and with the expansion of mobile technologies customers can get a better alternative Customers can have access to the internet anywhere anytime on the run using a GPRS connection Since the customer is charged per Kbytes the GPRS connection becomes very costly with every access to a website like Dubai s Financial Market 3 containing a plenty of data to download Additionally with a normal GRPS connection if the customer is interested in stock information from different stock markets he she has no other choice but browsing through each website This solution is costly time consuming inconvenient in addition to this the customers stocks of interest might be only few out of all the stocks available at the website For these reasons M Stock was developed M Stock has a friendly and easy to use graphical user interface that allows the users to create portfolios for the preferred stocks The stocks selected can be from a single multiple financial market s The user can then retrieve the selected portfolio hence downloading only the few bytes constituting the required information In turn this process i reduces the connection costs significantly and ii provides a faster screen refresh rate as the number of bytes downloaded will be r
10. he system The main tasks of PHP server are e Retrieve process and insert Dubai Financial Market information in the MySQL database 3 e Retrieve process and insert Abu Dhabi Securities Market information in the MySQL database 1 e Store user profiles upon arrival of user request to create new profile e Send available financial markets available upon arrival of user request e Send available companies within the selected market upon arrival of user request e Send available stock prices high offer etc upon arrival of user request e Pull the portfolio information and send it back to the user upon arrival of request low bid e Continuously save stock information for past 7 days for all companies e Plot charts for the selected stock dynamically upon arrival of user request using stored information e Store alerts information in the database upon arrival of user request B 2 Application On the mobile side the application was developed and implemented using Java 2 micro edition J2ME 9 10 11 12 17 18 The application classes interoperate to provide the user with a friendly easy to use and a handy tool for performing various stock market transactions The application made use of the javax microedition rms package Record Management Store RMS is a persistence package that provides the application with a mechanism for persistent storage of data Hence the application used this package for persistent storage of us
11. mmunication A secure connection is achieved using the HTTPS protocol Using HTTPS guarantees that information exchange between the two parties is protected against any malicious intrusions Robustness and efficiency are achieved using established protocol explained in Table 1 URL request Action act 1 Retrieve markets act 2 amp mkt market_name Retrieve company names for the market specified by market_name string Retrieve prices Retrieve profile information of profile specified by id act 3 act 4 amp id x Table 1 The M Stock protocol used to efficiently exchange information between the web server and mobile client User requests are delivered to the server using either Wireless LAN network Bluetooth BT or GPRS In case of BT WiFi the request is routed to the ADSL internet connection where it reaches the server Basically these user requests are URLs that are formulated based on the predefined protocol that acts on minimizing the traffic sent back and forth between the mobile and the server hence the connection costs are significantly reduced Upon the arrival of a user request the server tokenizes the request to retrieve the request parameters The server formulates the appropriate SQL query accordingly that performs the action implied by the request If the URL requested by the user requires a response the server streams back the requested information as per retrieved from the database in the form o
12. ng an alert and getting charts The user created a profile which has only one stock DU from Dubai Financial Market and closing price information to be retrieved From time point of view the connection was fairly fast It just takes few seconds to retrieve the data Money wise the connection was extremely cheap The cost of the connection emphasizes the reduced number of packets transferred and received by the end user and accomplishes the main aim of the design Hence the protocol efficiency is validated Retrieving the data costs only 1 fils as opposed to downloading the whole page which costs around 2 dirhams Retrieving charts costs 7 fils and setting an SMS alert costs only 3 fils C M Stock vs Normal GPRS This section presents a comparison for real time data retrieved using M Stock and a normal GPRS connection We first access the DFM website through a normal GPRS connection and monitor the number of bytes downloaded cost and time Then we retrieve the portfolio information compare and contrast As shown below the comparison is done in terms of the following criteria e Number of bytes downloaded retrieved using Ethereal which is a software used for sniffing packets transferred 5 e Price approximately calculated by multiplying the bytes monitored by the average cost byte e Time in seconds M Stock 10 Kbytes Normal GPRS Bytes 200Kbytes downloaded Table 2 Comparison between the M Stock and normal GR
13. ng the requested information through MMS is a quite involved process Unlike SMS sending an MMS doesn t merely depend on the GSM modem for delivering the MMS message content GPRS technology for data transmission should be supported by the GSM modem as well To send an MMS message thus we need a GSM GPRS modem connected to the PC s serial port Since MMS technology usually runs over GPRS a PPP point to point protocol connection needs to be initiated between the GSM GPRS modem and the PC PPP works on transmitting the datagrams containing MMS content from serial point to point links This connection shall be established through a set of AT commands to get attached to a GPRS connection through which the running application can stream data and transmit in the form of MMS message This approach however was not followed for several reasons First the GSM GPRS modem was more expensive than an GSM modem Second programming the complication is complicated Third the GPRS connection cost is usually expensive for this service Therefore we had to implement a better faster and a more efficient approach The alternative was to invoke a PHP page upon requesting the chart which pulls the required data from the database and creates the chart dynamically Meanwhile the server sends a response to the requesting client containing the image streamed The application then receives the stream creates the image and displays it immediately to the
14. on on Symbian OS John Wiley and Sons July 2004 13 Nokia Prototype SDK for Java Platform Micro Edition Available at http forum nokia com 14 E Ortiz The Wireless Messaging API 2002 Available at http developers sun com techtopics mobility midp articles wma 15 PHP Support Available at http www php net 16 Pocket X Stock Monitor Software Available at http www pocketx net 17 Sun Microsystems Simplified Guide to the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition white paper September 1999 18 Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2 5 http java sun com products sjwtoolkit Beta Available at M Stock Pocket X Stock Monitor Language Compatibility All devices Only Pocket PCs Method retrieval selections Notification SMS Notification popup user window user offline online online On the spot 20 minutes delay Portfolio Create Edit Delete Create Edit Delete Manager Graphs Dynamically Cumulative i e created as per user request display past seven days price fluctuations with every stock quote fetched a Refresh Rate Fetch at a selected interval Click point is added to the graph refresh to refresh once Fetch at a selected 25 license interval Table 3 Comparison of features between M Stock and the commercial Pocket X Stock Monitor
15. stem is tested and analyzed in Section IV In Section V previous work in this area is summarized Finally the conclusion and future work are presented in Section VI II SYSTEM OVERVIEW This section covers the details regarding the system connections and system components The section proceeds with a general layout of the design Thereafter the first subsection proceeds with the reader through the protocol used to establish the achieved design objectives The second subsection will guide the reader through an overview of the complete system and how its different components interoperate and connect Stock Exchanges 4 729 37 4 703 581 4 677 60 4 652 015 4 626 238 10 00 11 30 01 00 Access Point Y BIAS QIM Trsog J441 E an HTTP HTTPS IWE Database Web server Isav dnyerq Bluetooth T Figure 1 General overview of the M Stock system A System Connections Figure 1 shows a general overview of the system The web server has to be connected to the internet via a fast internet connection e g ADSL The speed of the internet connection determines the speed of service The server uses the internet connection for two main tasks 1 Connect to stock market websites which is done using the webservices provided by the stock markets 8 2 Respond to user requests The mobile application i e client connects to the server through an agreed upon protocol that grants an efficient robust and secure co
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