Evaluation of transport protocols for web services

Web services can be used as a middleware for standardized, interoperable machine-to-machine communication. However, the technology has communication overhead, leading to a need to investigate ways to optimize its resource use when applying the technology in limited capacity networks. There exist several approaches to optimization, and in this paper we investigate potential gains from replacing the commonly used HTTP/TCP transport for Web services with alternative transport protocols. We study four different protocols (TCP, UDP, SCTP, and AMQP) for conveying Web services traffic, evaluating them in an emulator under typical civil and military networking conditions.