WS-Sim: A Web Service Simulation Toolset with Realistic Data Support

Service-oriented computing has become the most promising paradigm for system integration and interoperation. Many different models and mechanisms have been proposed to achieve security, dependability, real-time, etc. capabilities in service composition and execution. To facilitate the evaluation of these mechanisms, especially their performance impacts, it is generally desirable to have a web service simulation environment. However, many existing simulations are based on specific cases and specialized for evaluating specific mechanisms. In some cases, the simulations are based on randomly generated data to simulate the property of the simulated web services without the support of realistic data from actual web services and/or applications. In this paper, we take the first step towards building a general and more practical web service simulation system, WS-Sim. We explore many existing web services and various applications that can be readily wrapped into services and measure the statistical characteristics of their nonfunctional properties. Based on these measurements, we build a database of simulated web services and their nonfunctional property descriptions. We also develop a toolset to generate simulated web services and deploy them to support various simulation tasks, so as to evaluate the performance of various web service protocols.