Distributing resource intensive mobile web services

One of the goals that can be achieved by providing adaptive web services from mobile hosts is to allow continuous service provisioning. However, there are limitations in terms of complexity and size of the services that may be executed on mobile hosts. In this paper, two steps are taken towards providing adaptive web services from resource limited mobile devices. The first step is to investigate mechanisms that facilitate distributing the execution of mobile web services; the main mechanisms are offloading and migration. The second step is to integrate these mechanisms with available web service architectures to produce an extended mobile web service framework. In this case we integrated them with both SOAP as well as REST. The paper describes the offloading and migration mechanisms as well as the implementation of a prototype that allows performance evaluation of both extended frameworks. To investigate the load and performance of the distributed services, the prototype implements resource intensive applications. The results presented show that basing distributed mobile-hosted services on REST is more suitable than using SOAP as underlying web service infrastructure.