Automatic Measurement of a QoS Metric for Web Service Recommendation

A prototype for automated measurement of QoS attributes on both the client and provider sides, when the service is being used, and updating the QoS-aware Web services directory with this information is described and the results are presented.

Abstract

Web services have enabled businesses and organizations to collaborate without platform interoperability and programming language barriers. Quality of service (QoS) of a Web service is an important factor that differentiates similar services offered by different service providers. Such a measure would allow Web service clients to choose and bind to a suitable Web service at run time (based on QoS attributes). Some researchers have proposed the integration of the QoS measure on the Web service directory server. However, a mechanism to maintain the QoS metric has not been defined yet. In this paper, we propose such a mechanism. This mechanism involves automated measurement of QoS attributes on both the client and provider sides, when the service is being used, and updating the QoS-aware Web services directory with this information. We describe a prototype we developed for this purpose and present the results of using this prototype for gathering QoS measurements at run time.