A cross-layer quality driven approach in Web service selection

In order to make Web services operate in a performance optimal status, it is necessary to make an effective decision on selecting the most suitable service provider among a set Web services that provide identical functions. We argue that the network performance between the service container and service consumer can pose a significant influence to the performance of Web service that the consumer actually receive, while current researches have limited emphasis on this issue. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer approach for Web service selection which takes the network performance issue into consideration during the service selection process. A discrete representation of cross-layer performance correlation is proposed. Based on which, a qualitative reasoning method is introduced to predict the performance at the service user side. The integration of the quality driven Web service selection method to service oriented architecture is also considered. Simulation is designed and experiment results suggest that the new approach significantly improves the accuracy of Web service selection and delivers a performance elevation for Web services.