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Driven by the significant benefits brought by service computing, a large number of applications are accessed on the Web through web services. Web services have enjoyed a wide spectrum of application fields (Yu, 2008). This leads to the variety and the complexity of online services, which keep increasing over the time. As a result, the traditional platforms for deploying and hosting web services start facing their limitations and become insufficient for those complex services that have special requirement on portability, timeliness, and flexibility, Enabled by the current mobile computing technologies, such services can benefit from deployment on a mobile device delivered in a mobile environment. For example, mass transit systems can use a mobile server to host a geo-location service that provides real-time location as well as scheduling and route information to the commuters. Services hosted on a mobile device also benefit a supply chain management system, where shipped products can be accurately tracked across the world. In military, soldiers in the battlefield can use smartphones with web services hosted on them to directly share information, communicate, and gather intelligence from other soldiers in vicinity, without depending on a third-party service, which introduces extra latency. Skilled people like doctors and nurses can also use a mobile web service in remote areas, in emergent and disastrous situations, to obtain and share patient information in a more proactive and timely way, compared to the communications through a third-party service.
Meanwhile, the spread of mobile devices around the world and the availability of dynamic mobile content have significantly pushed the transition of web service deployment platforms and made hosting complex services on mobile devices possible (Miller, 2008, McFaddin, 2003, Srirama, 2006, Pham, 2005). Recent innovations in wireless broadband technologies such as Wifi, WiMax, 3G, and 4G allow consumers to access and share increasing amount of web services and applications right on their mobile devices. Today, consumers are rapidly transitioning towards a post-PC world where a mobile device is capable of performing essential functions of a tradition personal computer (Malladi, 2002). First developed and introduced by Nokia in 2007 1, the concept of using mobile devices as web servers is still under research (Srirama, 2006). A mobile web server consists of a mobile device (e.g., an Android phone) with an application which functions as a web server such as Apache HTTP Server or Apache Jetty. The application then provides the mobile device the capability to host web sites, web services, and web applications.