A Proximity-Based Self-Organizing Framework for Service Composition and Discovery

The ICT market is experiencing an important shift from the request/provisioning of products toward a service-oriented view where everything (computing, storage, applications) is provided as a network-enabled service. It often happens that a solution to a problem cannot be offered by a single service, but by composing multiple basic services in a workflow. Service composition is indeed an important research topic that involves issues such as the design and execution of a workflow and the discovery of the component services on the network. This paper deals with the latter issue and presents an ant-inspired framework that facilitates collective discovery requests, issued to search a network for all the basic services that will compose a specific workflow. The idea is to reorganize the services so that the descriptors of services that are often used together are placed in neighbor peers. This helps a single query to find multiple basic services, which decreases the number of necessary queries and, consequently, lowers the search time and the network load.