Flexible QoS-aware service composition in highly heterogeneous and dynamic service-based systems

Service-oriented pervasive systems, composed of a large number of devices with heterogeneous capabilities where devices' resources are abstracted as software services, challenge the creation of high-quality composite applications. Resource heterogeneity, dynamic network connectivity, and a large number of highly distributed service providers complicate the process of creating applications with specific QoS requirements. Existing approaches to service composition control the QoS of an application solely by changing the set of participating concrete services which is not suitable for ad-hoc service-based systems characterised by high intermittent connectivity and resource heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a flexible way of formulating composition configurations suitable for such service-based systems. Our formulation proposes the combined consideration of the following factors that affect the QoS of a composed service: (a) service selection, (b) orchestration partitioning, and (c) orchestrator node selection. We show that the proposed formulation enables the definition of service composition configurations with 49% lower response time, 28% lower network latency, 36% lower energy consumption, and 13% higher success ratio compared to those defined with the traditional approach.