MWSMF: a mediation framework for mobile hosts and enterprise on cloud

Purpose

Web services are going mobile. A mobile enterprise can be established in a cellular network by participating mobile hosts, which act as web service providers, and their clients. Mobile hosts enable seamless integration of user‐specific services to the enterprise, by following web service standards, also on the radio link and via resource constrained smart phones. However, establishing such a mobile enterprise poses several technical challenges, such as the quality of service (QoS), discovery aspects and proper integration solutions, for the network as well as for the mobile phone users. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and research associated with this domain and with establishing the mobile enterprise.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper summarizes the challenges and research in the mobile web services domain, along with a detailed discussion of the developed mobile web service mediation framework (MWSMF). MWSMF is realized based on the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, as an intermediary between mobile hosts and web service clients. Moreover, to scale the mobile enterprise to the loads possible in cellular networks, some of the components of MWSMF are shifted to the new utility computing paradigm, cloud computing.

Findings

From the study it was found that ESB provides a good integration solution for the mobile enterprise research challenges. The detailed analysis of the MWSMF concludes that the mediation framework and its components are horizontally scalable, thus allowing to utilize elasticity of cloud platform to meet load requirements of mobile enterprise in an easy and quick manner.

Originality/value

The study addresses the research with providing services from smart phones and establishing mobile enterprise. The QoS challenges are addressed and the study introduces an integration framework using ESB technology. The porting of MWSMF onto the cloud is also addressed. As an added value, the research serves as a case study for porting enterprise applications to the cloud.

Performance evaluation of a discovery and scheduling protocol for multihop ad hoc mobile grids

Despite the many research efforts addressing the integration of mobile nodes into grids, only a few of them have considered the establishment of mobile grids over wireless ad hoc networks (hereafter,mobile ad hoc grids). Clearly, such grids need specialized resource discovery and scheduling mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, though, the research on these mechanisms for mobile ad hoc grids is still preliminary. Besides, and more importantly, it has approached discovery and scheduling as separate mechanisms, which, we argue, is not suitable for mobile ad hoc grids. In this paper, we propose the integration of resource discovery and scheduling for mobile ad hoc grids into a single protocol called DICHOTOMY (Discovery and sCHeduling prOTOcol for MobilitY). This protocol allows computational tasks to be distributed appropriately in a mobile ad hoc grid, while mitigating the overhead of discovery messages exchanged among the nodes. Our experiments show that the protocol: (i) does proper scheduling, allowing an efficient load balancing among the nodes and helping with lowering the average completion time of tasks; (ii) keeps the discovery efficiency at acceptable levels in mobility scenarios and (iii) scales very well with respect to an increasing number of nodes, both in the total amount of energy savings due to packet transmissions and the distribution of such savings among the nodes.