A graph-based algorithm for partitioning of mobile web services

Web services are getting popular in the domain of business to business electronic commerce and in automating information exchange between business processes because of the interoperability they provide in a distributed heterogeneous environment. Most existing systems use web services that are hosted in fixed infrastructures. Hosting web services on wireless mobile devices is challenging because of their limited resources. The few efforts made by researchers in the past are effective only for hosting of simple web service (WS) applications. However, the existing techniques are not adequate for hosting of WS applications that involve large and complex business processes or invoked by multiple concurrent WS clients. This research proposes to use an application partitioning approach so that the execution of some parts (partitions) of a WS application can be offloaded to a powerful computing node. A critical analysis of existing partitioning approaches for traditional and mobile applications is presented and a graph theory based algorithm for WS application partitioning is proposed. A performance analysis of the algorithm is made through prototyping and measurements.