Mobile hosts in enterprise service integration

Basic web services are widely being accessed from smart phones due to the advances in wireless devices and mobile communication technologies. While such mobile web service (MWS) clients are common, the thesis addresses the scope of providing web services from smart phones, thus integrating personalized mobile services into cellular enterprises and Internet. A ‘Mobile Host’ capable of providing basic web services from smart phones was developed and the performance analysis of the tool proved the technical feasibility of the concept. Service delivery and management from Mobile Host are now technically feasible. However, the ability to provide proper quality of service (QoS) for the Mobile Host is observed to be very critical, especially in terms of security and reasonable scalability. In the security analysis, the adaptability of the WSSecurity specification to the mobile web service provisioning (MWSP) domain is analyzed. The scalability analysis tried to reduce the size of the MWS messages being transmitted by means of different compression technologies. The analyses mainly focused on additional latencies caused to the performance of the Mobile Host by the added QoS features. Mobile Host finds its use in domains like mobile community support, collaborative learning, social systems etc. The smart phone can act as a multi-user device without additional manual effort on part of the mobile user. The thesis extensively studied the applications of Mobile Host in the m-learning domain and developed the MobileHost CoLearn system, as a tool helping in the collaborative learning process. The user evaluation of the system clearly showed the adaptability of Mobile Hosts by different communities. The huge number of web services possible, with each Mobile Host providing some services in the wireless network, makes the discovery of these services quite complex. The traditional centralized UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) based registries are not adaptable, as they can have bottlenecks and can make single points of failure. Moreover, the dynamic nature of the mobile nodes makes the binding information change regularly, thus leaving many stale advertisements in the registry. Hence a dynamic MWS discovery mechanism is proposed, that uses the peer to peer network and its features for publishing and discovery of mobile web services. Based on Mobile Host’s application, QoS and discovery research, the deployment scenario of the Mobile Hosts in cellular networks is identified. A ‘Mobile Web Services Mediation Framework (MWSMF)’ is established as an intermediary between the web service clients and the Mobile Hosts, based on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology.