Mobile services (m-services) play an important role in daily life and work of modern societies. Current service oriented architectures (SOA) are widely used to offer Web Services on wired networks. However, no significant research has been done in m-services field to provide availability service and dynamical discovery to mobile users. Nowadays, mobile devices are characterized by limited resources such as processing power, memory, display screen and connection bandwidth. In this context, we propose a service oriented architecture that addresses the following issues: (1) dynamical integration of new services by providers at anytime, (2) dynamical discovery of available services and (3) the use of open source software to develop the solution. With this approach, users require no prior knowledge of accessible services nor require updating the application of their mobile devices when new services are incorporated. The paper includes results with service scenarios, showing that Web Services can safely be used as paradigm to support m-services.

Abstract. Making mobile phones capable of consuming Web services over wireless networks is a challenging task because of the different issues to be addressed and the limited resources of mobile devices. In this paper, we focus on the issue of how to perform dynamic discovery and invocation of Web services from mobile phones when a J2ME wireless middleware is used. In order to solve the limitations of the middleware platform when mobile phones act as Web services requestor we propose a Web service based dynamic proxy between service providers and mobile consumers. With this approach, we provide the following features to mobile devices: (1) support of dynamic binding, (2) support of UDDI specification, (3) support of SOAP messages with encoded representation and (4) handling of complex data types. The paper includes the description of the dynamic proxy, implementation and experimental results with the performance of the approach proposed.

New business opportunities are being enlarged by mobile phones. Electronic commerce on mobile phones is an emerging expression of internet electronic commerce to provide sophisticated services to mobile users. The Web services technology has been proposed to support electronic commerce on wired networks. However, no significant research has been done to allow mobile phones acting as Web services requestor at runtime without prior knowledge of available services. In this paper, we propose a service oriented architecture to mobile phones. We introduce service managers as proxies between services providers and mobile devices in order to solve the limitations faced by direct access from mobile devices to Web services. We investigate the use of dynamic invocation interface as communication mechanism between service providers and service managers in order to compute service description and invocation at runtime. With this approach, we allow that service providers to create, update and change services at anytime and mobile users may locate new services without knowing the accessible services. We have implemented a first prototype with open source tools and basic service scenarios.