Dynamic Service Contract Enforcement in Service-Oriented Networks

In recent years, service-oriented architectures (SOA) have emerged as the main solution for the integration of legacy systems with new technologies in the enterprise world. A service is usually governed by a client service contract (CSC) that specifies, among other requirements, the rate at which a service should be accessed, and limits it to no more than a number of service requests during an observation period. Several approaches, using both static and dynamic credit-based strategies, have been developed to enforce the rate specified in the CSC. Existing approaches have problems related to starvation, approximations used in calculations, and rapid credit consumption under certain conditions. In this paper, we propose and validate DoWSS, a doubly weighted algorithm for service traffic shaping. We show via simulation that DoWSS possesses several advantages: It eliminates the approximation issues, prevents starvation, and contains the rapid credit consumption issue in existing credit-based approaches.