A framework for QoS computation in web service and technology selection

There is a global trend of convergence of voice, video and data. Industry is facing a major shift from circuit-based voice networks to packet-based converged networks. In the last few years, data networks have been growing at much faster rate than voice networks, mainly due to the growth of Internet. As a result of this trend, more and more data are being sent over Data Networks (Voice over IP, Voice over Frame Relay, and Voice over ATM). The standards used are SOAD, WSDL, and UDDI. The emerging Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm promises to enable businesses and organizations to collaborate in an unprecedented way by means of standard web services. To support rapid and dynamic composition of services in this paradigm, web services that meet requesters' functional requirements must be able to be located from a large and constantly changing number of service providers based on their Quality of Service (QoS). In order to enable quality-driven web service selection, we need an open, secure and fair framework to evaluate the QoS of a vast number of web services. The fair computation and enforcing of web services should have minimal overhead but yet able to achieve sufficient trust by both service requesters and providers. In this paper I present our open and fair QoS computation model for web service selection. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.