A benchmark on soap's transport protocols performance for mobile applications

Abstract

Handheld mobile devices with wireless capability are gaining popularity. SOAP is a text-based protocol for Web services, but it has high overhead and its suitability for resource-constrained devices over wireless networks needs to be reevaluated. SOAP uses HTTP; HTTP in turn uses TCP as the underlying transport protocol for transmitting messages. However, TCP has a high overhead and high network latency. In this paper, a benchmark of the performance of different underlying transport protocols for SOAP is reported. We show that SOAP-over-HTTP and SOAP-over-TCP are inefficient and lead to high latency and transmission overhead for wireless networks. The results also show that SOAP-over-UDP provides much higher throughput compared to SOAP-over-HTTP.