A decentralized approach to network-aware service composition

Abstract

Dynamic service composition represents a key feature for service-based applications operating in dynamic and large scale network environments, as it allows leveraging the variety of offered services, and to cope with their volatility. However, the high number of services and the lack of central control pose a significant challenge for the scalability and effectiveness of the composition process. We address this problem by proposing a fully decentralized approach to service composition, based on the use of a gossip protocol to support information dissemination and decision making. The proposed system builds and maintains a composition of services that fulfills both functional and non functional requirements. For the latter, we focus in particular on requirements concerning the composite service completion time, taking into account both the response time and the impact of network latency. Simulation experiments show that our solution converges quickly to a feasible composition and can self-adapt to dynamic changes concerning both service availability and network latency.