An Evaluation of Service Composition Technologies Applied to Network Management

Service composition is a technique that may help the development of management systems by aggregating smaller services to produce more sophisticated ones. Service composition can be realized by using traditional management technologies, although these technologies have not been conceived taking composition support as one of their main aspects. Current service-oriented architecture (SOA)-related efforts, however, define specific standards for Web services composition, such as the Web services business process execution language (WS-BPEL). Web services for network management have been investigated by the management community at least in the last four years, but up to today no research evaluating Web services composition applied to network management has been carried out. In this paper we present such an evaluation where compositions based on the IETF Script MIB, ad-hoc Java Web services, and WS- BPEL are compared against one another in a managed network where BGP routers are investigated in order to identify route advertisement anomalies.