QoS management in service-oriented architectures

The next generation of software systems will be highly distributed, component-based and service-oriented. They will need to operate in unattended mode and possibly in hostile environments, will be composed of a large number of ‘replaceable’ components discoverable at run-time, and will have to run on a multitude of unknown and heterogeneous hardware and network platforms. This paper focuses on QoS management in service-oriented architectures in which service providers (SP) provide a set of interrelated services to service consumers, and a QoS broker mediates QoS negotiations between SPs and consumers. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) the description of an architecture that includes a QoS broker and service provider software components, (ii) the specification of a secure protocol for QoS negotiation with the support of a QoS broker, (iii) the specification of an admission control mechanism used by SPs, (iv) a report on the implementation of the QoS broker and SPs, and (v) the experimental validation of the ideas presented in the paper.