An OSGi-based Service Oriented Architecture for Android Software Development Platforms

During the past few years, service oriented approaches have been appeared as a new research paradigm providing better control, re-usability, and reliability for the software developments. With the growing complexity of embedded systems, new methodologies are needed to facilitate design, implementation, and maintenance of such systems, while providing means to capitalize software developments. Although embedded mobile devices are usually considered as resource restricted, there is a great demand to incorporate service-oriented approaches to achieve more dynamicity and robustness. To this end, this article aims at the establishment of a service oriented approach to integrate OSGi into the mobile Android platform to make the software development adaptive and dynamic. The main contribution of this paper is the establishment of a middleware solution incorporating OSGi into Android software development platform, which provides a servicearchitecture for Android-based applications. The presented solution is illustrated through an example. Additionally, performance evaluations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.