A new approach to QoS driven service selection in service oriented architectures

Service selection has been widely investigated by the SOA research community as an effective adaptation mechanism that allows a service broker, offering a composite service, to bind at runtime each task of the composite service to a corresponding concrete implementation, selecting it from a set of candidates which differ from one another in terms of QoS parameters. In this paper we present a load-aware per-request approach to service selection which aims to combine the relative benefits of the well known per-request and per-flow approaches. We present experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation of a service broker. Our results show that the proposed approach is superior to the traditional per-request one and combines the ability of sustaining large volume of service requests, as the per-flow approach, while at the same time offering a finer customizable service selection, as the per-request approach.