Service oriented architecture for constrained environments

Abstract

KEYWORDS: Service-oriented Architecture; Web Services; Mobile Computing; Service Discovery; Service Description. The work presented in this dissertation deals with implementing the concepts of ServiceOrientedArchitectureoverconstrainedenvironmentstakingintoaccountthedistinctandunique requirements of the same. Over the last decade, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become the preferred approach to building adaptive distributed information systems. This is owing to the fact that such systems have distinct properties like loose coupling, platform independence, seamless integration within and across organizational boundaries. Such properties enable the system to adopt rapid changes by recombining and scaling existing services. There has been a plethora of work reported on SOA in literature and practice. Most of this work, however, does not consider constrained and mobile environments as distinct. The fact remains that traditional approaches are definitely not directly applicable to mobile environments owing to the latter’s dynamic and distinct nature. ThisdissertationcontributeswithasetofapproachesandmethodstofacilitateSOAinconstrained environments. First, a service registry framework is proposed that manages dynamic, light weight, and distributed service registries ‘solely’ over constrained and mobile devices. Second, we propose a dynamic, lightweight, extensible, and detailed service description approach especially designed for constrained mobile environments. The novel approach takes into account crucial description aspects such as isolated data sources, collaborating partners, hardware along with the functional, non-functional, business, and contextual aspects. Third, a model inspired from ‘Membrane Computing’, to describe and execute a mobile workflow is proposed. The model orchestrates the mobile service workflow in a decentralized manner. Finally, the novel approaches proposed are validated by engineering a mobile prototype in the form of an android service and evaluating the same in an actual laboratory setting with the intent of assessing the efficacy of the same. The research presented here has the potential to be applied by practitioners in scenarios where there is little or no preexisting infrastructure. Examples of such scenarios include warfront settings, disaster relief operations and so on. Further, the dissertation would provide researchers with a foundation to work towards security issues, QoS improvement, and other related issues in the field of mobile SOA.