Reputation-Enhanced QoS-based Web Services Discovery

With an increasing number of Web services providing similar functionalities, quality of service (QoS) is becoming an important criterion for selection of the best available service. Currently the problem is twofold. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries do not have the ability to publish the QoS information, and the authenticity of the advertised QoS information available elsewhere may be questionable. We propose a model of reputation-enhanced QoS- based Web services discovery that combines an augmented UDDI registry to publish the QoS information and a reputation manager to assign reputation scores to the services based on customer feedback of their performance. A discovery agent facilitates QoS-based service discovery using the reputation scores in a service matching, ranking and selection algorithm. The novelty of our model lies in its simplicity and in its coordination of the above mentioned components. We present experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using a prototype implementation of the model.