DaaS: Cloud-based mobile Web service discovery

The proliferation of smartphones and the recent advancement in ubiquitous wireless access have made mobile Web services more possible than ever before. However, finding relevant Web services that can match requests and fit user context remains a major concern. The challenges facingWeb service discovery are furthermagnified by the stringent constraints of mobile devices and the inherit complexity of wireless heterogeneous networks. Cloud computing, with its flexible design and theoretically unlimited computing resources, is a viable approach to bootstrappingWeb service discovery. The cloud can build bridges between mobile devices, as a convenient ubiquitous interface, and a backbone infrastructure with abundant computing resources. This paper introduces ‘‘Discovery as a service (Daas)’’, a novel cloud-based discovery framework that addresses the core components of mobile Web service discovery. The DaaS framework lays the foundation of efficient mobile Web service discovery that takes into consideration user preferences and context. The experimental validation and performance evaluation demonstrate that DaaS can effectively rank relevant services according to the various user context and preferences, in addition to enhancing the precision of the discovered services. The prototype also shows that Web service clustering for discovery significantly improves the overall response time, while the cloud maintains scalability according to prespecified performance criteria. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.