Mobile Web Service Provisioning

Introduction

This project, discusses the confluence of two major recent trends in distributed information systems engineering: the evolution from static content via personalized adaptive information provisioning to web services, and the emergence of mobile terminals with sufficient speed and capabilities to serve as parts of information systems. The combination of both trends yields the idea of mobile web services. While a few pioneering mobile web service client systems have appeared, this project explores the logical next step; whether it is feasible to use mobile terminals such as smart phones also as web service providers (“Mobile Hosts”).

Figure 1: Basic mobile web services framework with Mobile Host

To support our argument, we have developed such Mobile Host in this project. Mobile Host is a light weight web service provider built for resource constrained devices like cellular phones. It has been developed as a web service handler built on top of a normal web server. The web service requests sent by HTTP tunneling are diverted and handled by the web service handler. The Mobile Host was developed in PersonalJava on a SonyEricsson P800 smart phone. The footprint of our fully functional prototype, including the extensive set of services and the service management, is only 130 KB. Open source kSOAP2 was used for creating and handling the SOAP messages.

The detailed evaluation of this Mobile Host clearly showed that service delivery as well as service administration can be done with reasonable ergonomic quality by normal mobile phone users. As the most important result, it turns out that the total web service processing time at the Mobile Host is only a small fraction of the total web service invocation cycle time (<10%) and rest all being transmission delay, in a GPRS network. This makes the performance of the Mobile Host directly proportional to achievable higher data transmission rates.

Figure 2:  The Mobile Web Services Mediation Framework deployment scenario

The current research in this project includes study of providing proper QoS for the Mobile Host, means of discovering huge number of mobile web services possible with Mobile Hosts and QoS facilitating middleware frameworks for the Mobile Host. The application scope of the Mobile Host is also being checked in different domains. We are interested in mobile community support, e-learning, social networks and etc.