A proxy-based architecture for dynamic discovery and invocation of web services from mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices are getting more pervasive, and it is becoming increasingly necessary to integrate web services into applications that run on these devices. We introduce a novel approach for dynamically invoking web service methods from mobile devices with minimal user intervention that only involves entering a search phrase and values for the method parameters. The architecture overcomes technical challenges that involve consuming discovered services dynamically by introducing a man-in-the-middle (MIM) server that provides a web service whose responsibility is to discover needed services and build the client-side proxies at runtime. The architecture moves to the MIM server energy-consuming tasks that would otherwise run on the mobile device. Such tasks involve communication with servers over the Internet, XML-parsing of files, and on-the-fly compilation of source code. We perform extensive evaluations of the system performance to measure scalability as it relates to the capacity of the MIM server in handling mobile client requests, and device battery power savings resulting from delegating the service discovery tasks to the server.