Towards Service Description for Mobile Environments

Mobile devices today are increasingly being looked upon as potential platforms for service provisioning rather than mere ´service consumers´. There is, however, much that needs to be done to realize this. A detailed, dynamic, and lightweight service description is an important requirement for the automatic and efficient discovery, selection, and subsequently provisioning of services over mobile devices. Traditional approaches for service provisioning are usually not directly adaptable to the mobile environments owing to the latter´s dynamic and distinct nature. Hence, in this paper a lightweight and extensible approach for service description especially designed for mobile environments is proposed. The proposed approach incorporates detailed and rich descriptions covering functional, non-functional, contextual, and business aspects of services to be provisioned over mobile devices. The service descriptions have been partitioned along these lines and the various parts are distributed between service registries and the mobile service providers. This facilitates the service provider to maintain an up-to-date description without having to compromise on the overall consistency of the description. The proposed service description is good for a heterogeneous environment comprising both wired and wireless systems. A prototype of the proposed system has been implemented with the intent of validating the feasibility of the approach.