QoS-based Discovery and Ranking of Web Services

TLDR

Discovering Web services with keyword‑based UDDI APIs often fails to meet clients’ functional and QoS needs, and while standards such as UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP promise QoS‑aware discovery, they face technical challenges in controlling and managing service discovery across registries. The study aims to improve Web service discovery by proposing the Web Service Relevancy Function (WsRF) to rank services according to client preferences and QoS. WsRF calculates relevancy scores by integrating client preferences and QoS metrics to produce a ranked list of services. Experimental validation, results, and analysis demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Discovering Web services using keyword-based search techniques offered by existing UDDI APIs (i.e. Inquiry API) may not yield results that are tailored to clients' needs. When discovering Web services, clients look for those that meet their requirements, primarily the overall functionality and Quality of Service (QoS). Standards such as UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP have the potential of providing QoS-aware discovery, however, there are technical challenges associated with existing standards such as the client's ability to control and manage discovery of Web services across accessible service registries. This paper proposes a solution to this problem and introduces the Web Service Relevancy Function (WsRF) used for measuring the relevancy ranking of a particular Web service based on client's preferences, and QoS metrics. We present experimental validation, results, and analysis of the presented ideas.