Toward an architectural knowledge base for wireless service engineering

Wireless services are software-based services that exploit distribution infrastructure embedded in our everyday life as various communication and computing technologies. Service architecture defines concepts and principles to develop and maintain services to obtain the quality issues with minimum cost and faster time-to-market. In order to boost the development of wireless services, more effective means of using existing architectural know-how and artifacts are required. Our contribution is the architectural knowledge base that introduces three cornerstones: the service taxonomy, reference service architecture, and basic services that alt together provide an efficient means of creating added value with wireless services. The service taxonomy assists in identifying the required functional and quality properties of services and the constraints of the underlying technology platforms. The reference architecture realizes the required properties, based on a selected set of architectural styles and patterns, and provides a skeleton upon which a new end-user service can be developed faster and more easily by using partially ready-made solutions, and furthermore, to keep the architectural knowledge base evolving at the same time. The architectural knowledge base has been validated in several research projects with industrial companies.