Approaches for optimizing the performance of a mobile SAML-based emergency response system

The fast access of essential and latest information from anytime and anywhere is crucial for the success of fire mission planning and is still a challenge, if requirements such as high performance, security and simplicity have to be met concurrently. However, the secure access to the distributed information of public authorities like building plans or medical patient data is currently mostly available via the traditional time-consuming post. Due to this problem a mobile integrated solution is developed, which allows a secure and holistic access to relevant information. The solution is based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) architecture which specifies an XML based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data. Unfortunately, the performance of this approach is not applicable for time-critical mobile applications because of the SAML specific communication procedures. Thus, this paper presents two approaches for boosting the performance and shows the results of performance evaluation for the required validation. Moreover, an analytic model is introduced for identifying the SAML specific processing time.