Quality of service in business-to-business e-commerce applications

Electronic commerce has attracted a great deal of attention recently. Among the different types of electronic commerce, business-to-business is the one most widespread in terms of turnover. An important aspect in business-to-business e-commerce scenarios is how to meet the response time and throughput requirements of applications in spite of execution taking place across corporate boundaries and, in the future, via the Internet instead of using leased lines. Given the unpredictable variations of available bandwidth in today´s Internet, providing application quality-of-service guarantees for these requirements is a complex task. Due to the current trend to run multimedia applications over the Internet, we assume that the future Internet will not only support best-effort service but also guaranteed service, e.g. via network resource reservation. This allows us to also take advantage of this service for e-commerce applications. The problem remains non-trivial due to the wide variations among application scenarios. As a first step towards implementing a generic solution, this paper proposes a scheme which enables virtual business processes to meet response time and throughput requirements through network resource reservation. The paper describes the application scenarios we have in mind, the WISE (Workflow-based Internet SErvices) system where these ideas are being implemented, and the mechanisms involved in providing quality-of-service guarantees at the application level