Mobile service provisioning is intended to serve interoperable functionality from mobile devices over the network. The mobile service paradigm shifts the role of mobile devices from consumers to providers, opening up new opportunities for a multitude of collaborative services and applications ranging from sharing personal information to collaborative participatory sensing. Although many basic principles of the standard Web service approach continue to apply, the inherent limitations of mobile devices and broadband wireless access render the deployment of standard architectures in mobile environments inefficient. This research introduces two concepts that revolutionize mobile service provisioning: personal and cloud-assisted service provisioning. Personal services are intended to offer a range of user-centric data services to a limited set of consumers that are explicitly authorized by the user providing the service. Personal services facilitate prevailing trends such as social networking and mobile healthcare services, without compromising personal privacy. Cloud-assisted service provisioning bridges the gap between limited resources of mobile devices and increasing resource demands of mobile applications. This approach provides reliable and efficient mobile services, while alleviating the burden on limited mobile resources. Both approaches take advantage of the device's mobility and real time access to various context information. Experimental results reveal that personal services offer personalization based on the user's context and preferences, while cloud-assisted service provisioning, in addition to optimizing the consumption of mobile scarce resources, offers significant improvement to the reliability and availability of mobile services. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-03 10:28:42.795