Delay and disruption tolerant Web services for heterogeneous networks

Web services technology is considered a key enabler for NEC. However, existing Web service protocols are designed for use over the Internet, and cannot necessarily be directly applied in military tactical networks where bandwidths are low and communication disruptions are frequent. In this paper we present a novel prototype proxy solution which adds both delay and disruption tolerance to SOAP. The ¿Delay and disruption tolerant SOAP Proxy¿ solution can bridge heterogeneous networks and offers store-and-forward capabilities, delay tolerant network capabilities and swappable transport protocols while retaining backward compatibility with COTS Web service clients and servers. The proxy solution does not rely upon parsing or inspecting the SOAP messages, which allows for end-to-end security through encryption.