Performance comparison of communication models for Service Oriented Architectures

When designing distributed applications for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the method chosen for service implementation is crucial. This paper determines a rule for choosing the best implementation method through performance comparison of two important communication implementation paradigms - blocking (“synchronous”) and non-blocking (“asynchronous brokered communication”). The service, service requester, service provider, and broker (in the non-blocking case) are evaluated by simulation. Conditions for equal performance are determined, which are expressed in terms of average normalised work, generalising previous work by yielding a rule for choosing the optimal SOA implementation for any given system parameters. We also investigate the stability of this rule with respect to changes in the way the system components are probabilistically modelled.