Evaluation of an Architecture for Providing Mobile Web Services

As the role of mobile devices as Web Service consumers is widely accepted, already today a large number of mobile applications consume Web Services in order to fulfill their task. Still, no reasonable approach exists as yet, to allow deploying Web Services on mobile devices and thus use these kinds of devices as Web Service providers. In this paper, our approach is presented that allows deploying Web Services on mobile devices by the usage of well-known protocols and standards. In order to achieve this, the presented approach overcomes problems that usually occur when mobile devices are used as service providers. Here, the description of an implementation is presented, along with first performance tests and an evaluation of the battery consumption that results in using the presented approach. The performance test shows that the described approach provides a reasonable way to introduce Web Service provisioning for mobile devices, but the results for the battery consumption provide some challenges that need to be met, e.g., the determination and evaluation of scenarios that benefit from using mobile Web Services. Last but not least, this paper provides first ideas how complex mobile scenarios can be evaluated in order to decide whether they benefit from using mobile Web Services.