Asynchronous Mobile Web Services: Concept and Architecture

Today, mobile devices are capable of providing services instead of just being service consumers. These services deployed on mobile devices are known as Mobile Web Services (Mob-WS). In this paper, a middleware for long running Mob-WS that avoids the overheads of long durational synchronous Mob-WS in introduced. A concept and architecture of such asynchronous Mob-WS middleware is presented. Moreover, the middleware subsystem, the high-level architecture and control flow are presented in detail. Since every service has application specific requirements, the service data representations that ease the service deployment process are described. In order to verify the notion, a prototype with a focus on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been developed and briefly discussed. Finally, the manuscript is concluded and future research directions are identified.