Mobile devices, such as cellular phones, personal digital assistents (PDAs), and organizers, are becoming increasingly popular. Due to the high volatility of those devices, the achievable quality-of-service (QoS) for mobile services can hardly be predicted. Even for one particular type of device - say a PDA - the implementation of a mobile service may use different communication interfaces over time (i.e.; wireless LAN, IrDA).Within this paper, we present a new approach towards configuration of component-based services for mobile systems. Starting from a XML-based configuration language, which defines a set of rules for component configuration depending on a number of environmental parameters, our approach allows for instantiation and configuration of components.In contrast to many other approaches targeting distributed multimedia-style application on PC-class computers, our framework focuses on the extension of distributed services onto mobile devices. As proof-of-concept scenario we have implemented a configurable distributed video surveillance application on the basis of the Microsoft Distributed Component Object Model on Windows 2000 and on the Windows CE-based Pocket PC platform.