An Autonomic Service Delivery Platform for Service-Oriented Network Environments

In this paper, we propose a novel autonomic service delivery platform for service-oriented network environments. The platform enables a self-optimizing infrastructure that balances the goals of maximizing the business value derived from processing service requests and the optimal utilization of IT resources. We believe that our proposal is the first of its kind to integrate several well-established theoretical and practical techniques from networking, microeconomics, and service-oriented computing to form a fully-distributed service delivery platform. The principal component of the platform is a utility-based cooperative service routing protocol that disseminates congestion-based prices amongst intermediaries to enable the dynamic routing of service requests from consumers to providers. We provide the motivation for such a platform and formally present our proposed architecture. We discuss the underlying analytical framework for the service routing protocol, as well as key methodologies which together provide a robust framework for our service delivery platform that is applicable to the next-generation of middleware and telecommunications architectures.