Efficient SOAP binding for mobile Web services

Existing Web services rely on HTTP and TCP as the underlying transport protocols for SOAP messaging. While these protocols provide a number of benefits, including being able to pass through firewalls and are universally supported across different platforms, they were designed for wired networks with high bandwidth, low latency and low error rate transmissions. Due to the variability of wireless channels however, these assumptions do not hold in wireless environments. In this paper, we investigate the performance of HTTP and TCP as transport protocols for SOAP in wireless environments. Through extensive testing, we show that SOAP-over-HTTP and SOAP-over-TCP are inefficient and lead to high latency and transmission overhead for wireless applications. To overcome these limitations, we study the use of UDP as a binding protocol for SOAP. The results obtained are promising and show that SOAP-over-UDP provides throughput that is ten times higher compared to SOAP-over-HTTP in a wireless setting. Furthermore, using UDP to transport SOAP messages reduces transmission overhead by more than 50% compared to SOAP-over-HTTP. Finally, to illustrate where UDP binding can be useful, example applications are also described in this paper