Mobile Service Platform: A Middleware for Nomadic Mobile Service Provisioning

Ongoing miniaturization and power efficiency of mobile devices have led to widespread availability of devices that have an increasing amount of processing power and storage, and that support multiple wireless network interfaces connecting to various auxiliary devices and to the Internet. It is now feasible for a mobile device to host services and participate in a service discovery network. Roaming of a mobile device from one wireless network to another entails nomadic characteristics to the hosted services. We denote this class of services as Nomadic Mobile Services. This paper discusses the requirements for Nomadic Mobile Service provisioning and proposes the Mobile Service Platform (MSP) as a supporting infrastructure and middleware which extends the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm to the mobile device. The MSP design is based on the Jini Surrogate Architecture Specification which enables devices that 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.