Bottom-up fault management in composite web services

Abstract

We propose an approach for managing bottom-up faults in composite Web services. We define bottom-up faults as abnormal conditions/defects or changes in component services that may lead to run-time failures in composite services. The proposed approach uses soft-state signaling to propagate faults from components to composite services. Soft-state denotes a class of protocols where state (e.g., whether a service is alive) is constantly refreshed by periodic messages. Its advantages include implicit error recovery and easier fault management, resulting in high availability. We introduce a bottom-up fault model for composite services. Then, we propose a soft-state protocol for bottom-up fault propagation in composite services. Finally, we present experiments to assess the performance of our approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.