Web Services for Ad Hoc and Resource-Impoverished Environments

摘要

This paper describes a prototype that demonstrates the practicality of using SOA (using SOAP-based web services) in tactical military and other crisis environments. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural pattern for constructing and deploying systems based on components called services that can be efficiently combined via standard interface formats. SOA can reduce integration cost, and enhanced agility in response to changing situations, but it has not been widely applied to support mobile users in ad hoc, wireless computing environments common in tactical military and crisis response situations. Such environments are impoverished in terms of computational resources (e.g., small computing devices and limited battery power), and network characteristics (e.g., relatively low bandwidth, wireless, often ad hoc, and unreliable). The prototype explores the viability of using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and smartphone technologies for identifying available assets and using those assets to gather situational awareness data. The prototype demonstrates smartphone real-time video and other capabilities that were inconceivable even a few years ago.