Migrating Web Services in Mobile and Wireless Environments

Abstract

Mobile devices enabled with Web services are being considered as equal participants of the Web services environment. The frequent mobility of devices and the intermittent disconnection of wireless network require migrating or replicating Web services onto adjacent devices appropriately. This article proposes an efficient method for migrating and replicating Web services among mobile devices through code splitting. Specifically, the proposed method splits the source code of a Web service into subcodes based on users’ preferences for its constituent operations. The subcode with a higher preference is migrated earlier than others. The proposed method also replicates a Web service to other devices to enhance its performance by considering context information such as network traffic or the parameter size of its operations. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the effect of the code splitting on migration was analyzed. Furthermore, to show the feasibility of the proposed migration method, three application scenarios were devised and implemented.