eSMP: A Multicast Protocol to Minimize SOAP Network Traffic in Low Bandwidth Environments

Web services, which are built on SOAP as the transport protocol, have emerged in recent years as a promising technology to enable interoperability between distributed applications. As such, SOAP may be used to handle a large number of transactions; and consequently it is desirable to have SOAP perform efficiently in high traffic environments. This paper presents eSMP, an extension of our previous work on a similarity-based SOAP multicast protocol (SMP). eSMP offers improvements over SMP in terms of traffic size by using its own routing protocol instead of the conventional shortest path algorithm to route messages to paths that will minimize the number of bytes transmitted in the network. From extensive experiments, it is shown that eSMP achieves a minimum of 25 percent reduction in total network traffic than SMP with a trade-off of 10 percent increase in average response time. Compared to unicast, bandwidth consumptions can by reduced by up to 80 percent when using eSMP and 70 percent when using SMP. Therefore, eSMP is suitable for applications where bandwidth requirement is critical but not time.