MSM: A Middleware Architecture for Enhancing Interaction with Mobile Services

Abstract

Mobile services are wireless computing applications and services that can be either pushed to user's handheld wireless devices or downloaded and installed, over the air, on handheld wireless devices. While there are several discovery protocols available, most of them do not address the issue of interacting with downloadable services. In other words, once a service has been discovered and selected to be used, how do users interact with such a service? The worst possible scenario is when a user pays for a service that is unusable, possibly because the device is not capable of running the service. In this paper, we present the mobile service manager (MSM) middleware architecture that enables multiple interaction models suitable for mobile devices, and discuss its components. We argue that supported interaction models should be specified in the service advertisement, and we propose an extension to the Web service description language (WSDL) for describing services and their supported interaction models.