Crescent: A Byzantine fault tolerant delivery framework for durable composite web services

Abstract

Composite web service delivery is a very complex process that involves many complex tasks such as capacity management, components discovery, provisioning, monitoring, composition and coordination, customers' SLAs management, moreover it requires cancellation and billing management. Indeed, managing all these tasks manually is a very cumbersome operation, nevertheless it is time consuming and prone to errors. To overcome such problems, this paper proposes Crescent; a Byzantine fault tolerant service delivery framework for durable composite web services. Crescent ensures the full automation of the composite web service delivery process. Furthermore, Crescent combines between quorum-based and practical Byzantine fault tolerance protocols as well as components adaptive parallel provisioning approaches to ensure reliable Byzantine fault tolerant service delivery. Crescent enables customers to have differentiated levels of service by allowing the composite web service to support different types of workflows. Experimental results showed that Crescent increases the reliability and throughput of composite web service delivery when compared with existing approaches. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.