Bridging Together Mobile and Service-Oriented Computing

Abstract

The growing popularity of powerful mobile devices, such as modern cellular phones, smart phones, and PDAs, is enabling pervasive computing (Weiser, 1991) as the new paradigm for creating and interacting with computational systems. Pervasive computing is characterized by the interaction of mobile devices with embedded devices dispersed across smart spaces, and with other mobile devices on behalf of users. The interaction between user devices and smart spaces occurs primarily through services advertised on those environments. For instance, airports may offer a notification service, where the system registers the user flight at the checkin and keeps the user informed, for example, by means of messages, about flight schedule or any other relevant information. In the context of smart spaces, service-oriented computing (Papazoglou & Georgakopoulos, 2003), in short SOC, stands out as the effective choice for advertising services to mobile devices (Zhu, Mutka, & Ni, 2005; Bellur & Narendra, 2005). SOC is a computing paradigm that has in services the essential elements for building applications. SOC is designed and deployed through service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and their applications. SOAs address the flexibility for dynamic binding of services, which applications need to locate and execute a given operation in a pervasive computing environment. This feature is especially important due to the dynamics of smart spaces, where resources may exist anywhere and applications running on mobile clients must be able to find out and use them at runtime. In this article, we discuss several issues on bridging mobile devices and service-oriented computing in the context of smart spaces. Since smart spaces make extensive use of services for interacting with personal mobile devices, they become the ideal scenario for discussing the issues for this integration. A brief introduction on SOC and SOA is also presented, as well as the main architectural approaches for creating SOC environments aimed at the use of resource-constrained mobile devices.