Evaluating the Dependability of Dynamic Binding in Web Services

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) provides a flexible framework in which applications are built up from services, often distributed across a network. One of the promises of SOC is that of Dynamic Binding where abstract consumer requests are bound to concrete service instances at runtime. What is clear from existing research is that there exist several components that help to provide the necessary behavior for dynamic binding. However, the focus of these works is on the evaluation of the implementation of dynamic binding and does not consider an evaluation of dynamic binding systems themselves. To remedy this, we propose new system and fault models for Dynamic Binding in SOC that incorporate the types of components required for a Dynamic Binding System (DBS) and the types of fault that can affect these components. In addition to these models, we introduce a novel evaluation framework for the testing of a DBS. This distributed and extensible framework treats the DBS as a black box and hence is not restricted to the implementing technologies of the DBS. Finally we present the results of a series of experiments, which focus on the interactions between a client and the DBS. We discuss what these results reveal about the DBS under test and how they illustrate the value of our evaluation framework.