Optimizing Web Service messaging performance in mobile computing

Abstract

The performance and efficiency of Web Services in conversational and streaming message exchanges can be greatly increased by streaming the message exchange paradigm. In this paper, we describe our design and implementation of a novel approach to message exchange optimization. This area is particularly important for applications in physically constrained mobile computing environments, but there is great potential for other applications. The verboseness of the XML-based SOAP representation imposes possible overheads in mobile Web Service applications. In order to help minimize such overheads, we separate data content from the syntax and use streaming message exchanges. The redundant or static message parts are stored in a shared metadata space—the Context-store. Therefore, the streamed messages themselves are not self descriptive, but the combination of the message and the negotiation captured in the Context-store is self descriptive. We describe our architecture and evaluate our approach by testing the performance of the resulting system. The empirical results show that our framework outperforms conventional Web Services in both conversational and streaming message exchanges with mobile clients. We demonstrate how to find the breakeven point at which our methods overtake conventional SOAP messaging for a particular application.