Mobile Web Service Provisioning – QoS and Discovery Issues

Abstract. The advanced features of today’s smart phones and hand held devices, like the increased memory and processing capabilities, allowed them to act even as information providers. Thus a smart phone hosting web services is not a fancy anymore. During one of our projects, we have developed such a Mobile Host and analysed its performance and application scope. While Mobile Host is technically feasible, the ability to provide proper QoS in the vulnerable and volatile mobile ad-hoc topologies is quite challenging. The QoS should ensure secure and reliable web service communication in the resource constrained radio link. While many standards exist in the wired network, ensuring the QoS of web services, not much has been analysed and standardized for mobile web services. Our study contributes to this work and we tried to adapt some of the existing QoS standards to mobile web services domain. Mobile Host opens up a new set of applications and it finds its use in many domains like mobile community support, collaborative learning, social systems etc. But the relevant discovery of the services provided by the smart phones has became quite complex, because of the volume of services possible with each Mobile Host providing some services. Centralized registries have severe drawbacks in such a scenario and alternate means of service discovery are to be addressed. P2P domain with its resource sharing capabilities comes quite handy and here in this paper we provide an alternate approach to centralized registry for discovering mobile web services. The services are published into the P2P network as JXTA modules and the discovery issues of these module advertisements are addressed. The P2P discovery approach also provides alternate means of identifying and addressing the Mobile Host