An optimal agent-based architecture for dynamic Web service discovery with QoS

Abstract

Web service is a new paradigm of using the Web. One of the fundamental supports of the web service vision is a brokerage system that enables services to be published to a searchable repository and later retrieved by potential users. Automated Web service discovery is a key challenge in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) research. There exist many web services which exhibit similar functional characteristics. It is imperative to provide service consumers with facilities for discovering required web services according to their nonfunctional aspects like QoS. An important issue arising from Web Service applications is how to conveniently, accurately and efficiently retrieve services from large-scale and expanding service repositories. The QoS based web service discovery play an essential role in SOA because most of the applications want to use services that accurately meet their requirements. We propose the agent-based architecture for dynamic Web service discovery which facilitates the requester to specify his/her QoS requirements along with functional requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for designing and developing an agent-based architecture and its QoS-based matching, ranking and selection algorithm for evaluating web services. The paper presents an optimal approach for finding the most suitable web service according to the consumer's requirements.