Performance Evaluation for SOAP and RFC in SAP Netweaver Platform

SAP Netweaver Application Server (AS) provides two communication protocols to connect SAP ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) systems with external systems: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Remote Function Call (RFC). RFC is the standard SAP interface for communication between SAP systems. SOAP is widely used in web service solutions for its nature cross-platform characteristic. It uses platform independent eXtensible Markup Language (XML) but it introduces more latency tags to represent the data. Thus, SOAP might need more memory and transferring time. This paper studies and compares their performance characteristic with introducing an evaluation model and then evaluates them for different use cases. This work gives a practical conclusion for protocol selection in special case.