A highly flexible and light mobile service oriented architecture

Journal of Software Engineering and Applications

Today's mobile devices and networks enable the development of novel mobile service applications. Developing such applications raises many challenges including heterogeneity in terms of mobile operating systems and APIs, service availability and scalability, and providing for the diverse communication needs of different applications. In this paper, we present an overview of the Odin middleware platform whose aim is to address these challenges. Odin utilises a surrogate-based architectural model to promote a mobile service's scalability and availability. The middleware is reconfigurable, allowing mobile applications to adapt to changing operating conditions and minimise resource consumption. It also includes an optimised communication channel that masks the complexity of interacting with mobile services over mobile telecommunications networks. Using Odin's interfaces and standards compliance, mobile applications and services with consistent communication behaviour can be easily implemented on heterogeneous platforms. Through quantitative evaluation, Odin's message-based communication primitives have been demonstrated to perform favourably with leading industry push messaging providers.

2000

In order to understand and gain practical insights into various aspects of next-generation enterprises (NGEs), we are building a testbed for flexible mobile applications. We started with a generic architecture and used it to build different applications in different domains. Our testbed consists of a multi-tiered architecture incorporating various user interfaces and access technologies, middleware components, enterprise integration systems, supply chain management and a host of currently emerging technologies. The first application we have developed is an information application for the Olympic Games to provide personalized information for mobile users through a variety of end-user devices. The second experiment is a typical e-commerce online purchasing application that uses mobile agents (brokers) to buy products from multiple suppliers based on user-specified criteria. The third example demonstrates a typical workflow scenario that may be needed in a highly collaborative and reliable NGE environment. In this paper, we present our preliminary experiences in building these applications. Based on our experience, we are pursuing further research and evaluation of various technologies for flexibility, mobility, scalability and ease of integration

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

One form of software architecture is a framework for systems that serve the needs of a specific domain. These frameworks must contain sufficient detail to not lose the interesting aspects of the environment, yet they must not expose so many details as to be overwhelming and force the developer to lose the big picture. As the environments we develop for become more complex, it becomes more necessary to compose these frameworks in order to manage the complexity. Mobility is precisely one such environment that is emerging as computing components shrink in size and become more portable. As these components change location in space, their connectivity to other components changes and thus their access to data changes. Some programs needs to be able to respond to this change in connectivity. Others are able to abstract it away, simply perceiving changes in connectivity as changes in data availability. In this paper, we overview a solution to managing the complexity of applications for the the mobile environment in the context of a middleware. First, we present a meta-model, or a framework for generating middleware for mobile environments. Second, we show how this meta-model has been instantiated in the Lime middleware and how it has been used to develop several mobile applications.

2007

Mobile Applications and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are two aspects of Computer Science which offer to Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) more agility and flexibility in order to follow the constant evolution of enterprises business. However, the inadequacy of hardware resources and wireless network availability and bandwidth constitutes a major constraint when developing any mobile application. The challenge is exacerbated for developers when trying to integrate these applications with EIS which are naturally heavier. This document presents this integration in the context of an EIS built on SOA. Added to the basic tools needed for local data storage and communication with the server, a mediator (on the device) is introduced to facilitate interactions between the application and the service. We also study reasons which lead us to the choice of implementing a gateway on the server, in order to facilitate the service consumption.

… World Research Forum …, 2006

2004

With the advent of the Internet and the plurality and variety of fancy applications it brought with it, the demand for more advanced services on cellular phones is increasingly becoming urgent. Unfortunately, so far the introduction of new enabling technologies did not succeed in boosting new services. The adoption of Internet services has shown to be more difficult due to the difference between the Internet and the mobile telecommunication system. The goal of this paper is to examine the characteristics of the mobile system and to clarify the constraints that are imposed on existing mobile services. The paper will also investigate successively the enabling technologies and the improvements they brought. Most importantly, the paper will identify their limitations and capture the fundamental requirements for future mobile service architectures namely openness, separation of service logic and content, multi-domain services, personalisation, PAN-based services and collaborative services.

2011 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices, 2011

Mobility is probably the most important ongoing revolution in the information society of today. The outstanding achievements made in computing and networking during the last decades (which have been available using personal computers at homes and workplaces) are progressively permeating all aspects of life thanks to the plethora of mobile devices at the disposal of the users, including netbooks, PDAs and smartphones. These are also increasingly intelligent and powerful, allowing for rich user interfaces and complex operations and software. On the other hand, the advance of the Internet has given birth to a converged Web which offers a myriad of different services just with a couple of clicks. However, in order to lower the barriers for accessing these services, a platform for ubiquitous service delivery and management is still required, and a viable alternative is presented along this work.

Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

The conventional Web Service communication framework does not adequately meet the needs of mobile computing. It is physically constrained and requires an optimized messaging scheme to prevent performance degradations in not only mobile computing, but also conventional computing that is interacting with mobile applications. With our novel architecture called the Handheld Flexible Representation (or HHFR), mobile applications can negotiate characteristics for message stream and representation, and exchange messages in an optimized streaming fashion. By distinguishing between message semantics and syntax, the architecture provides an overall system framework for Web Services applications in mobile computing environment. Despite its important role in distributed computing, mobile computing hasn't reached its full potential because of the limited availability of high speed wireless connections, such as third generation cellular technology (3G) or Broadband Wireless access. In this dissertation, we show that the messaging scheme of our new architecture significantly speeds up the messaging performance in comparison to a conventional SOAP-based Web Service messaging scheme when the request and response messages are in the same syntax, i.e. the same service is used continuously. vii

Information Systems Frontiers, 2004

There has been a surge of interest in developing advanced mobile voice and data services. One of the biggest challenges faced by service providers is to create new services efficiently and rapidly. We describe the motivation, architecture and design of the Mobile Application Server (MAS), a Java middleware prototype platform for mobile services which provides basic common building blocks required by mobile wireless applications, such as user profile management, location handling, device detection, content adaptation and e-wallet functions. The MAS is modular, flexible, and provides an open API for 3rd party service creation. Users can thus utilize a variety of access technologies (CDPD, cellular, 802.11, SMS, etc.) and delivery mechanisms (HTML, WML, VoiceXML, etc.) while application developers are spared the details of this heterogeneity. The MAS also interfaces to traditional telecommunications system (A/IN) elements such as SCPs as well as Next Generation Network (NGN) or convergednetwork elements such as Call Agents. We present application examples of the use of MAS, initial performance measurements and discuss some lessons learned from this experimental system. We conclude with directions for further work.

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