Abstract
The explosion growth in the market place for handheld wireless devices has enabled new opportunities for wireless applications. Currently, handheld devices are restricted to being clients that make requests to servers and receive responses over the network. But as mobile ad-hoc networks become the trend, such devices will need to become active participants that serve requests from other devices and convey data to other devices as well. In this paper we present our vision of the future role that handheld devices will play in a mobile ad-hoc network configuration. We present this vision as part of the MESSENGER project that develops data management mechanisms for UDDI registries of Web services using mobile users and their software agents, and then describe its extension for exchanging descriptions of Web services during ad-hoc collaboration sessions. User agents are in charge of interacting with peer users over an ad-hoc network, and collaborating on feeding UDDI registries with recent content. © 2006 IEEE.