A dynamic service description for mobile environments

Abstract

With the increasing processing capability of mobile platforms and advancements in Internet of Things, modern mobile devices have shown a favorable prospect for on-the-go service provisioning. However, there is much to be done to realize this. A detailed, dynamic, and lightweight service description is an important requirement for automatic and efficient discovery, selection, and subsequent provisioning of services over mobile devices. Traditional approaches for service description are usually not directly adaptable to mobile environments owing to the latter's dynamic and distinct nature. In this paper, we propose a dynamic, lightweight, extensible, and detailed service description especially designed for mobile environments, considering crucial aspects such as isolated data source, collaborator partners, and hardware aspects along with the functional, non-functional, business, and contextual aspects. The description has been partitioned along these lines and various parts of the description are distributed between service registries and the mobile service providers. An up-to-date and light weight description has been achieved by this, without compromising on the overall consistency of the description. A prototype of the proposed system has been implemented with the intent of validating the feasibility of the approach. Further, the proposed approach is suitable for a heterogeneous environment comprising both wired and wireless systems.