Evaluation of Distributed SOAP and RESTful Mobile Web Services

Even mobile Web Services are still provided using servers that usually reside in the core networks. Main reason for not providing large and complex Web Services from resource limited mobile devices is not only the volatility of wireless connections and mobility of mobile hosts, but also, the often limited processing power. Offloading of some of the processing tasks is one step towards achieving optimal mobile Web Service provision. This paper presents two frameworks for providing distributed mobile Web Services: One mobile service provision framework is built on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), while the other implements Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. Both frameworks have been extended with offloading functionality and different types of resource intensive operations, i.e., process intensive and bandwidth intensive services, have been tested. The results show that using a REST-based framework leads of a better performing offloading behaviour, compared to SOAP-based mobile services. Distributed mobile services based on REST consume fewer resources and achieve better performance compared to SOAP based mobile services. The paper describes the approach, evaluation method and findings. Keywords-Mobile Web Services; REST; SOAP; Service Distribution.