Provisioning Web Services from Resource Constrained Mobile Devices

The increasing processing power, storage and support of multiple network interfaces are promising the mobile devices to host services and participate in service discovery network. A few efforts have been taken to facilitate provisioning mobile Web services. However they have not addressed the issue about how to host heavy-duty services on mobile devices with limited computing resources in terms of processing power and memory. In this paper, we propose a framework which partitions the workload of complex services in a distributed environment and keeps the Web service interfaces on mobile devices. The mobile device is the integration point with the support of backend nodes and other Web services. The functions which require the resources of the mobile device and interaction with the mobile user are executed locally. The framework provides support for hosting mobile Web services involving complex business processes by partitioning the tasks and delegating the heavy-duty tasks to remote servers. We have analyzed the proposed framework using a sample prototype. The experimental results have shown a significant performance improvement by deploying the proposed framework in hosting mobile Web services.