A Load Balancing Scheme for ebXML Registries

Large scale Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) developments are becoming increasingly reliant on registry services that manage Web Services using taxonomic attributes. At present a registry stores a Web Services interface definition and protocol bindings in WSDL, along with one or more XML schema files that define the structure of a SOAP message exchanged between Web Services operations and client processes and other static metadata. During Web Service discovery an ebXML registry returns the access URI associated with the service binding to allow dynamic discovery and invocation. This usually restricts a calling process to a Web Service invocation on one host. This work explores a mechanism to manage service bindings for a Web Service that has been deployed across multiple hosts, such that, a URI returned by a registry can resolve to a host that satisfies different system constraints like current CPU load, physical memory, swap memory, and time of day. This paper discusses the design and development of new scheme for ebXML registries that facilitates periodic collection and management of dynamic system properties for registry clients and enforces constraints during service discovery and query operation.