Using Web Services for supporting the users of wireless devices

The Web Service paradigm is currently considered as the most promising and rapidly evolving technology for developing applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments. The proliferation of this new technology has coincided with significant advances in the hardware and software capabilities of wireless devices. The combination of the two worlds (i.e. making wireless devices capable of providing and consuming Web Services) is considered of major importance to the computing industry for the forthcoming years. This paper describes two scenarios of using Web Services in wireless devices, identifies their advantages and supporting technologies. A reference architecture for the use of Web Services in the wireless world is proposed. Finally, the results of the performance evaluation of an experimental setup are presented.