Enhanced transport bindings for efficient SOAP messaging

Within the past years the Web service technology emerged into more and more fields of application. In some cases the classical approach of using HTTP as a transport binding for SOAP seems no longer adequate. As a full scale application protocol HTTP causes a high amount of protocol overhead and is too inflexible for many Web Service scenarios. In this paper we initially give an in-depth review of existing transport bindings with a strong focus on data rate efficiency. Then we introduce an advanced UDP binding called PURE that significantly reduces the protocol overhead and enables interesting additional features such as point-to-multipoint communication via IP multicast and broadcast.