Session-Based SOAP Transmission and Processing

SOAP-based Web Services enable flexible software system integration especially in heterogeneous environments and is a driving technology for inter-organization business processes. Yet, the verbosity of the XML-based protocol and its accompanying standards poses performance challenges which need to be addressed and solved to obtain the efficiency and scalability required by large information systems.This paper proposes a novel approach to overcome these performance issues in scenarios where multiple service invocations occur between a requester and a service. A protocol is introduced which allows negotiating common and distinctive parts of the SOAP message. Thereby, a session is established between these two peers in which only distinctive parts of the SOAP message are subsequently transferred over the wire. This results in a significant efficiency improvement regarding transmission as well as processing costs.