Mobile Service Platform: A Middleware for Nomadic Mobile Service Provisioning

Nowadays mobile devices are characterized by higher processing power, lower costs, multiple network interfaces, ability to support multiple auxiliary devices and connect to the Internet using a wireless network. The applications collecting statistics concerning the mobile user, computational and communication environment of the mobile device are discovering applications in the area of context aware computing. Modeling the auxiliary devices and data applications as services provide the flexibility of allowing mobile device to participate in the discovery services network and provide these services to the clients located anywhere in the Internet. The mobile device roams from one mobile communication service to another which gives the service they host nomadic character. We name this class of service as Nomadic Mobile Service. This paper discusses the requirements for provisioning nomadic mobile service and proposes Mobile Service Platform (MSP) as a supporting infrastructure and middleware which extends Service Oriented Architecture paradigm to the mobile device. MSP design is based on Jini Surrogate Architecture Specification which enables the devices which can not directly participate in a Jini Network to join a Jini network with the aid of a third party. MSP consists of an HTTPInterconnect protocol to meet the specifications of Jini Surrogate Architecture and provides a custom set of APIs to develop and deploy a nomadic mobile service. This paper also presents case studies of MSP enabled services in diverse domains such as healthcare, robotics and positioning services. To conclude, we outline the need for a context-aware MSP.