A Framework for Optimizing the Availability of Composite Web Service
N.Sasikaladevi Dr.L.Arockiam
Lecturer,
Department of Computer Applications,
Bishop Heber College,
sasikalade@yahoo.com
Abstract
Web services are playing an important role in
today’s business environment. Business tasks are
computerized as jobs. Jobs are implemented as
composite web services in which more than one
specific service are involved. Numerous web services
are evolving now. In which choosing the appropriate
web service is a tedious task today. Consumer may
require service with some quality parameter. Service
Level Agreement plays a vital role in today’s
industry to get the desired services with the user
given parameters. Security, Reliability and
Availability are the important Quality of Service
metrics in which Availability plays a dominant role,
because the desired web service should be made
available to the user first. In this paper a framework
model is designed to optimize the availability metric
of composite web service.
1. Introduction
A Web Service is a software interface that
describes a collection of operations that can be
accessed over the network through standardized
XML messaging. It uses protocols based on the XML
language to describe an operation to execute or data
to exchange with another Web service. The basic
Web services architecture defines an interaction
between software agents as an exchange of messages
between service requesters and service providers.
Requesters are software agents that request the
execution of a service. Providers are software agents
that provide a service. Agents can be both service
requesters and providers. Providers are responsible
for publishing a description of the service(s) they
provide. Requesters must be able to find the
description(s) of the services. The basic Web service
architecture models the interactions between three
roles: the service provider, service discovery agency,
and service requestor. The interactions involve the
publish , find, and bind operations. These roles and
operations act upon the web service artifacts: the web
Associate Professor,
Department of Computer Science,
St,Joseph’s College,
larockiam@yahoo.co.in
service software module and its description. In a
typical scenario a service provider hosts a network
accessible software module (an implementation of a
web service). The service provider defines a service
description for the web service and publishes it to a
requestor or service discovery agency. The service
requestor uses a find operation to retrieve the service
description locally or from the discovery agency and
uses the service description to bind with the service
provider and invoke or interact with the web service
implementation. Service provider and service
requestor roles are logical constructs and a service
may exhibit characteristics of both.
• Service requester -- requests the execution
of a Web service
• Service provider -- processes a Web service
request
• Discovery agency -- agency through which a
Web service description is published and
made discoverable
A software agent in the Web services
architecture can act in one or multiple roles, acting as
requester or provider only, both requester and
provider, or as requester, provider, and discovery
agency. A service is invoked after the description is
found, since the service description is required to
establish a binding. Service requestor and service
provider interact, based on the service's description
information published by the provider and
discovered by the requester through some form of
discovery agency.
A web service is characterized by its flexibility
to encapsulate discrete business functionalities and
its interoperability to support universal application
integration. Composition of computational resources
and web-based services into integrated solutions is a
key activity to enhance offerings and allow for a
smooth process from the point of view of customers.
Such integration process has been greatly simplified
with the advent of web services technology.
 SLA plays a vital role in today’s e-business
environment. SLA is an agreement between the
service provider and service consumer. A service
level agreement is an agreement regarding the
guarantees of a web service. It defines mutual
understandings and expectations of a service between
the service provider and service consumers. The
service guarantees are about what transactions need
to be executed and how well they should be
executed. An SLA may have the following
components:
§ Purpose - describing the reasons behind the
creation of the SLA
§ Parties - describes the parties involved in
the SLA and their respective roles (provider
and consumer).
§ Validity period - defines the period of time
that the SLA will cover. This is delimited by
start time and end time of the term.
§ Scope - defines the services covered in the
agreement.
§ Restrictions - defines the necessary steps to
be taken in order for the requested service
levels to be provided.
§ Service-level objectives - the levels of
service that both the users and the service
providers agree on, and usually include a set
of service level indicators, like availability,
performance and reliability. Each aspect of
the service level, such as availability, will
have a target level to achieve.
§ Penalties - spells out what happens in case
the service provider under-performs and is
unable to meet the objectives in the SLA. If
the agreement is with an external service
provider, the option of terminating the
contract in light of unacceptable service
levels should be built in.
§ Optional services - provides for any services
that are not normally required by the user,
but might be required as an exception.
§ Exclusions - specifies what is not covered in
the SLA.
§ Administration - describes the processes
created in the SLA to meet and measure its
objectives and defines organizational
responsibility for overseeing each of those
processes.
Qualities of Services are defined in the service
level objectives part of SLA. SLA guarantee a level
of service delivered to a customer for a given price.
Service providers define all the aspects of the service
being provided. Generally QoS for web services are
security, performance and availability. Security can
be implemented by identity security and behavior
security. Identity security is a combination of
authentication and authorization between the service
provider and service user. Behavior security is the
trustworthiness of the result obtained by the web
service and trustworthiness of the resource sites
which are involved in the specific web service.
Performance includes response time and throughput.
Response time is the time for a service request to be
satisfied. Throughput is the servicing rate of the
service provider. At last, Availability is the
percentage of the time that a service provider can
offer services.
Availability is an important metric in QoS. A
service becomes unavailable to the service consumer
due to various reasons such as network failure,
hardware failure, software failure or operational
failure. Web services are implemented in distributed
environment. Service request and service response
should have traverse various intermediate sites which
are connected through network. If any one of the
network link fails, then the service becomes
unavailable to the service user. Service request
involves the use of various hardware resources in
servicing site. The failure of hardware makes service
unavailable to the consumer. The service designed by
the service provider may fail because of software
bugs. Service may be unavailable due to server
failure.
In this paper, we considered the availabilityof
the server to evaluate the availability of the service.
Further more, numerous similar services are available
for same task. If any one the service is unavailable,
we can choose the proxy service which does the same
thing. In this paper, we considered the proxy service
also, to achieve the better availability result. A new
framework model is designed for optimizing the
availability of the composite web service.
2. Related Work
Subil Abraham et all described a method to
enhance web service availability. They proposed
architecture for highly available web services for
mission critical applications. The central idea is the
enhancement of web services by the introduction of a
central hub to increase the availability of web
services.[1]
Cotroneo et all have given a model to improve the
availability of the web service. They presented the
overall architecture and the evaluation of a
middleware infrastructure which provides quality-of-
service differentiation among classes of
communication-bound processes. By
communication-bound processes are the processes
whose activity is typically dominated by network
communication, e.g. a video server. The proposed
architecture supports different classes of service,
each with different quality attributes concerning the
network data delivery performance. In particular, the
architecture is able to provide a class of service,
namely guaranteed service class, which is suitable for
increasing the service availability for a group of
premium users, especially in overloaded servers (in
absence of external faults).[2]
QoS issues are listed out by Menasce[3]. The
issues are,
• Availability is the percentage of time that a
service is operating.
• Security properties include the existence
and type of authentication mechanisms the
service offers, confidentiality and data
integrity of messages exchanged, non
repudiation of requests or messages, and
resilience to denial-of service attacks.
• Response time is the time a service takes to
respond to various types of requests.
Response time is a function of load
intensity, which can be measured in terms of
arrival rates (such as requests per second) or
number of concurrent requests. QoS takes
into account not only the average response
time, but also the percentile (95th
percentile, for example) of the response
time.
• Throughput is the rate at which a service
can process requests. QoS measures can
include the maximum throughput or a
function that describes how throughput
varies with load intensity [3].
Magnos Martinello_and all has given the
impacts of error recovery in web service availability.
In their work, a composite performance and
availability modeling approach is considered where
various causes of service unavailability and two
different recovery strategies are taken into account.
For illustration purposes, sensitivity analysis results
are presented to show the impact on the web service
availability of various assumptions concerning the
architecture, the servers load, as well as the failure
and recovery processes [4].
N i = {S i , Bij }(i ∈ [1..n ], j ∈ [0..q ]
S i is the primary service in the composite web
service. Each node could only contain one primary
service. When composite service process to a
particular node, it will always call the primary
service first. If the primary service fails, backup
services substitute the primary service. Bij is the
back up service for S ; and q is the number of
backup service.
If q = 0 then no backup service available. If
q ≥ 1 then back up services are available.
Structuring the composite web service is a crucial
task. To implement the operation relationship of a
business task, we used Jorge Cardoso’s stochastic
workflow reduction (SWR) algorithm [6]. Figure 1
illustrates four relationships; they are sequential,
parallel, conditional, simple loop and dual loop. Each
node is a data assignment, exchanging an event,
doing an action, or executing a sub-process, applying
those relationship we can compute total availability
of a composite web service.
Composite service availability could be defined
as,
{
Ac = AN i , Os }
Ac denotes the aggregate availability,
AN i denotes the availability of each node and Os is
the operation relationship of sub set of node set.
Availability evaluation based on the Cardoso
operational relationships are given below,
• Sequential:
A = A(ti ) A(t j )
• Parallel:
A = A(t a ) A(tb )∏ A(ti )
i
• Conditional:
A = A(t a ) A(tb )∑ pi A(ti )
i

3. Composite Web Service • Simple loop:

Representation (1 − pi ) A(ti )
A=
1 − pi A(ti )
Business tasks are implemented as composite web n
service. Composite web service is defined as, Where, pi + ∑ poj = 1
C = {N i }(i ∈ [1..n ] j =1

C defines the composite web service for • Dual loop:

availability evaluation. The basic unit of composite (1 − pi ) A(ti )
A=
web service is defined as N i , n is the number of 1 − pi A(ti ) A(t j )
nodes in the composite web service. Service node is n
defined as, Where, pi + ∑ poj = 1
j =1
 Two states Markov model is used to represents up
and down state of the server. The failure rate ai is
the state of transition from up to down and recovery
rate bi represents the rate of transition from down to
up. The probability p i j that i servers of a total
N j servers are down is given by,
i Nj! i
p j= η j p 0 j , for i = 1,…. Nj
i!( Nj − i )i

aj
Where, η j= is the server unavailability rate
a j + bj
and p 0 j is given by,
−1
 Nj
ηi j 
p j =  Nj!∑
0


 i =0 i!( Nj − i )!
The probability that no more than N j − n j servers at
site j are down is:
Nj − nj
Nj!
Pj (n j , Nj ) = p 0 j ∑ i!( Nj − i)!η
i =0
i
j --1

This is the probability that at least n j servers in site

j of a total N j servers are available.

5. Framework Model for Optimizing the

Figure 1: Operational relationships of composite web service
4. Availability of Composite Web Service
Availability of the web service mainly depends on
the availability of the server which offers the service.
If the server is in down state, then the service will be
unavailable to the user. The service availability is the
percentage of time that a server is up or down. Let
MMTF (Mean time to failure) be the average time
of a server failure, and MMTR (Mean time to
recover) be the average time for recovering a server.
1 the customer with quality parameter
Failure rate of the server is , which is
MMTF
denoted by a . Recovery rate of the server
1 consumers who are using the service to
is , which us denoted by b . Composite
MMTR
service involves several services whose relationships
are given in the figure. Because of the enormous
growth of the web service, same task may be
performed by more than one service. So, Composite
service involves several services, for each and every
service in composite service may have several
alternates or proxies.
Availability of Composite Web Service
Availability is a predominant component QoS. A
service becomes unavailable to the service consumer
due to various reasons such as network failure,
hardware failure, software failure or operational
failure. Service may be unavailable due to server
failure. In this paper, a framework model is given to
handle the availability of server.
Several components are involved in the figure 2.
The components are.
• Service Providers: Service providers are
the software agent providing services to
mentioned in Service Level Agreement.
• Service Users: Service users are
meet their need.
• Service Broker: Service Broker is a
middleware between the service
consumer and service producers.
• Service Orchestrator: Service
Orchestrator initiates the execution of a
sequence of tasks associate with the
workflow of a service request.
 Figure 2: Framework model for optimizing the availability of composite web service
• Composite service Manager: Composite
service manager spilt the composite
service into a set of service based on the
Cardoso operational model.
• Availability Manager: Availability
manager evaluates the availability of the
service.
Steps involved in this model is,
1. A customer submits a service request to the
optimizing agent.
2. Composite service manager, who is part of
the optimizing agent, split composite service
into a set of services.
3. Availability manager contact service broker
through which servicing servers for a specific
web services are identified. It evaluates the
availability of each server using two state
Markov model as given in the equation 1.
The availability value of the service is given
to the composite service manger.
4. Composite service manager aggregate the
availability values. If the probability of the
availability of the services is greater than or
equal to the desired percentage of service
availability, then it sends the positive
response to the customer otherwise it sends
the negative response to the customer.
5. If the response from the composite service
manager is positive then the customer
initiates a job request to the service
orchestrator. Service orchestrator selects the
servers to complete the task. The response
from servers are consolidated, and then given
back to customer. If the response from the
composite service manager is negative then
the customer could not initiate the job
request.
If the probability of the availability of the
primary service is less than the percentage of
desired probability, then the availability manger
choose the backup service from the pool of similar
service and it will evaluate the availability
probability and it is given to the composite service
manager.
6. Conclusion
A simple framework model is proposed in this
paper to optimize the availability of the composite
web service. In future, the model has to be tested
with real time example with the use of simulator tool.
For this model, only the server availability is
considered to evaluate service availability. But
service availability is based on the availability of
network, hardware, software and operational aspect
of the service. In future, all these components have to
be considered to optimize the availability of the
composite web service.
7. References
[1] Subil Abraham, Mathews Thomas, Johnson Thomas,
“Enhancing Web Services Availability”, Proceedings
of the IEEE International conference on e-Business
Engineering, IEEE computer society, 2005.
[2] D.Cortroneo, M.Gargiulo, S.Russo, G.Ventre,
“Improving the availability of web services”,
Research article, Italian Ministry of research, 2004.
[3] Daniel A.Menasce, “QoS Issues in Web Services”,
IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE, December 2002, pp.
72-75.
[4] Magnos Martinello, Mohamed Kaaniche and Karama
Kanoun, “Web Service Availability-Impact of Error
Recovery”, Springer, 2003, pp.165-178.
[5] Judith Hurwitz, Robin Bloor, Carol Baroudi and
Marcia Kaufman, Service Oriented Architecture for
Dummies, Wiley Publisher, 2007.
[6] J.Cardosa, J.Miller, A.Sheth and J.Arnold, “Modeling
Quality of Service for Workflows and Web Service
Processes”, Technical Report, University of Georgia,
2002.
[7] Daniel A.Menasce, “Composing Web Services-QoS
View”, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE, December
2004, pp. 88-90.