Enabling Mobile Web Service Provisioning

For many years mobile devices were commonly recognized as Web consumers. However, the advancements in mobile device manufacturing, coupled with the astonishing achievements in wireless communication developments are both key enablers for shifting the role of mobile devices from Web service consumers to Web service providers. This paradigm shift is a major step towards the realization of pervasive and ubiquitous computing paradigms. Mobile web service provisioning is the art of hosting and offering Web services from mobile devices, which actively contributes to the direction of Mobile Internet. In this paper, we address the applicability, reliability, and challenges of mobile Web service provisioning. We study the different provisioning architectures along with the enabler technologies for publishing, discovering, and maintaining up-to-date mobile Web services. We point out the major open research issues in each provisioning aspect. Different performance aspects due to the resource constraints of mobile devices are discussed.