Challenges: wireless Web services

This paper describes the challenges of adapting existing Web-service architecture to the wireless environment. It presents a new, wireless, Web-service architecture based on the smart client model that can address some of the fundamental differences between the wireless and wireline environments. The fundamental differences between these environments can be called the mobile challenges, including (1) the unpredictable nature of the wireless network, (2) the limited processing capabilities and power on mobile devices, and (3) the need for consumer device to have a fast startup time for mobile applications. The smart client model suggests the following modifications to the existing Web-service stack in order to overcome these mobile challenges: (1) a lightweight Web-service container that runs on a resource-limited mobile device (the client), (2) a quality of user experience (QoUE) model based on application response time, application startup time, and power consumption, and (3) an adaptive application configuration algorithm that can exploit the tradeoff among the QoUE parameters to provide the best user experience given preferences and the device platform.