Mobile Web Services: State of the Art and Challenges

For many years mobile devices were commonly recognized as Web consumers. However, the advancements in mobile device manufacturing, coupled with the latest achievements in wireless communication developments are both key enablers for shifting the role of mobile devices from service consumers to service providers. This paradigm shift is a major step towards the realization of pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Mobile Web service provisioning is the art of hosting and offering Web services from mobile devices, which actively contributes towards the direction of Mobile Internet. In this paper, we provide the state of the art of mobile service provisioning as it currently stands. We focus our discussions on its applicability, reliability, and challenges of mobile environments and resource constraints. We study the different provisioning architectures, enabler technologies, publishing and discovery mechanisms, and maintenance of up-to-date service registries. We point out the major open research issues in each provisioning aspect. Performance issues due to the resource constraints of mobile devices are also discussed.