User-hosted SOA infrastructure over XMPP

The proliferation of user-owned connected devices has brought value to mobile application developers, which can make use of locally-available sensors and capabilities and send their information to the web, centralizing the data flows. A more distributed approach would have device capabilities offered directly on the network as services hosted by the user. These pervasive user-hosted services could be made discoverable and available over a public federated service infrastructure. The infrastructure would provide transport over an identity layer, where endpoints are addressed by their identities instead of network identifiers, and on top of which services can be exposed to be consumed by trusted friends or anonymous users, as the hosting user prefers. The work presented in this paper explores the possibility of implementing such a distributed social Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) over Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This SOA, which would expose re-usable coarse-grained software components in a service ecosystem, differs from traditional SOA because it attempts to counter the centralization existing services, in favour of a fully-distributed service ecosystem where each peer can behave both as service consumer and provider. Finally, an analysis is done on how suitable XMPP is to serve as a base protocol for such infrastructure.