Interoperating with heterogeneous Mobile Services

The emergence of mobile computing has created new classes of applications dependent upon the user’s location, context and interaction with their current environment. However, given the constraints of the wireless environment (i.e. weak connection, poor network quality of service and mobile devices with limited resources) developing distributed applications within this domain is a complex task. Therefore, new middleware has emerged to mask such problems from the user. These encompass synchronous (e.g. remote method invocation) and asynchronous (e.g. publish-subscribe and tuple spaces) communication paradigms. However, it is the heterogeneous nature of the solutions that has created a new problem. Only applications and mobile services developed upon the same middleware style can interoperate with one another. For example, a tourist guide client application interacts with services available at the user’s current location that provide tourist information. If the client is implemented upon a particular middleware platform (for example, SOAP) it will only function in locations that offer tourist services across SOAP.