Accelerating web service workflow execution via intelligent allocation of services to servers

The appropriate deployment of web service operations at the service provider site plays a critical role in the efficient provision of services to clients. In this paper, the authors assume that a service provider has several servers over which web service operations can be deployed. Given a workflow of web services and the topology of the servers, the most efficient mapping of operations to servers must then be discovered. Efficiency is measured in terms of two cost functions that concern the execution time of the workflow and the fairness of the load distribution among the servers. The authors study different topologies for the workflow structure and the server connectivity and propose a suite of greedy algorithms for each combination. Keywords: Composite Web Services, Service Providers, Service Provision, Web Services, Web Services Deployment
INTRODUCTION A web service is typically defined in the literature--for example, see Alonso, Casati, Kuno and Machiraju (2004)--as an interface that describes a collection of operations provided through the internet [...]