WIPdroid – A Two-way Web Services and Real-time Communication Enabled Mobile Computing Platform for Distributed Services Computing

Abstract

We present a mobile distributed computing platform, WIPdroid, for distributed services computing in mobile environment with real-time communication capabilities. It is based on WIP, Web services session initiation protocol, for real-time service-oriented communication over IP. It integrates the emerging mobile endpoint platform, Android, from Google's initiative of open handset alliance (OHA). The WIP component of WIPdroid supports Web services based communication over IP. But most importantly, it transforms WIPdroid into a mobile SOA Web services endpoint. Applications developed on WIPdroid can be exposed and enabled by two-way Web services. This makes WIPdroid well suited for distributed computing and SOA based applications, such as communication enabled business process (CEBP) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). It also leads to a new type of dual-mode phone, with one communication mode from the binding with the physical mobile environment, e.g. GSM, CDMA, 3G, etc., and one fully web services enabled, service-oriented communication over IP mode from WIP. A prototype WIPdroid mobile computing platform is developed and tested. In order to support advance Web services capabilities on mobile endpoints, we developed an endpoint-edition of two-way Web services application proxy (2SAP) which has a small memory footprint (2-3 MB) and can be hosted on a mobile endpoint/handset, e.g. smart phone and PDA.