Fault Tolerant Service Composition in Service Overlay Networks

In a service overlay network, the services provided by different service providers might span multiple Internet domains. A service provider failure may cause significant performance deterioration. Thus, it is desirable to provide fault tolerant service composition solutions such that the service composition can be switched to the backup service composition solution in case of a service provider failure. To provide 100% protection against a single service provider failure, fault tolerant service composition essentially requires to partition service providers into two disjoint sets, each of them can provide a service composition solution. We study a generalized fault tolerant service composition which aims to find two service composition solutions for each request to minimize the number of shared service providers. Subject to such a primary objective, we also aim to minimize the total service composition cost. We firstly prove that the problem is NP-Complete, and formulate the problem as an integer linear program. We then propose heuristic algorithms to efficiently solve the problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithms.