An architecture for availability and performance in wide-area service composition
Bhaskaran Raman, Randy Howard Katz · 2002
With the growth of wireless telecommunications and the mobile Internet, there is an increasing demand for mobile data services. Novel value-added services and content provisioning are expected to be the driving force behind the deployment of future communication networks and the mobile Internet. In this context, we consider the idea of service composition, where independent service components deployed and managed by providers are assembled to enable a novel composed service. A simple example of service composition is a scenario where a video-on-demand service is enabled on a thin client by composing it with a video transcoder service component. Composition achieves flexible service creation through the reuse of the individual components. We term the set of service components in a composition, along with the network path in-between, as a service-level path. In this thesis, we address the issues of availability and performance in such service composition. When a service-level path spans multiple Internet domains (the wide-area Internet), its availability is affected by that of the underlying Internet path. Studies have shown that interdomain Internet path availability is poor, and when inter-domain path failures happen, Internet route recovery can take several tens of seconds to several minutes. We address this issue by (a) detection of failures on the Internet path that constitutes a leg of the service-level path, and (b)