Lightweight distributed service platform for adaptive mobile services

Distributed computing environments are becoming more heterogeneous due to the integration of different wireless and fixed networks and variety of terminal devices that can be used to access content and services on the Internet. Also, increasing user expectations of personalizable, adaptive, and context-aware mobile services bring complexity to the development of future mobile services. The distributed and heterogeneous computing environment, together with increasing user expectations, set requirements for future mobile services that are difficult to meet without service platform support alleviating service development. In this work, a lightweight distributed service platform that has been designed with a practical design approach to support the adaptation of mobile services, and partly also personalization and context-aware functionalities of the services, is presented. A requirement analysis for future mobile services is carried out by an extensive literature review. The mobile service adaptation support functionality of the service platform is designed based on the identified requirements. Further architecture based on the concept of Generic Service Elements is designed for the service platform. The validation of the architecture is achieved by a prototype implementation. The validation was successfully achieved by the prototype implementation. It also proved the service platform's applicability to resource-constrained distributed mobile computing environments as the prototype resulted in an overall size of less than 360 KB, of which approximately one third is allocated to the mobile terminal domain.