Exploring SOAP and REST communication on the Android platform

The usage of smart devices, such as phones and tablets, is becoming a more integral part of military information systems. The applications running on these systems need to exchange information with services running elsewhere in the information infrastructure. Many of these systems use SOAP Web services as their information exchange interface, but this technology is not natively supported on Android, the most common operating system for smart devices. Android does however have native support for REST, but this is not directly interoperable with SOAP Web services. In this paper we investigate the performance of both SOAP and REST Web services on Android, and find that while REST services consume less power, SOAP Web services give better responsiveness.