Personalised ubiquitous file access with XML Web Services
The explosion of new types of end-user devices, as well as the increase in the number of users with broadband connection in private households, opens up the opportunity to provide access to documents and services residing in the home domain from remote locations. Also, the increased mobility of users, as well as the need to be able to work in all locations, further adds to the requirement of remote document access. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it introduces the Mobile Home Access system, which simplifies remote access to resources in a home domain. The Mobile Home Access (MHA) system is based on the Service-Oriented Computing concept and realized using XML Web Services for communication between the home domain and the end-user device, while employing the Common Internet File System (CIFS) network file system to allow appropriate file access in the home domain. The second contribution is the mechanism whereby such a service can be deployed when network elements like firewalls and NAT routers are introduced. The challenge of establishing a connection from a remote device is general for both clientserver services and peer-to-peer services. The paper proposes and describes a design and implementation of a solution using XML Web Services technologies, and thus shows how NAT traversal technology can be integrated with such middleware. The third contribution of this paper is a performance analysis of the current implementation of the Mobile Home Access service. The results of the analysis should be interesting for the applicability of XML Web Services in mobile computing in general.
xml web services mobile middleware personal services remote file access mobile services mobile devices vpn