Performance considerations for mobile web services

Web services are an emerging technology that provides a flexible platform for web interaction. We evaluate Web service performance of handheld resource-constrained clients using different wireless technologies. Due to the usage of XML, message sizes in Web services are larger than in traditional web technologies and therefore, compression of Web service messages is attractive; as our experiments show in particular for mobile clients with poor connectivity and high communication costs. However, compression requires CPU time at both the server and the clients. We present measurement results of a simple dynamic scheme that provides benefits by compressing responses only when the required server resources are available.