A Consistency-Preserving Mechanism for Web Services Response Caching

Web services are rapidly emerging as a popular standard technology for sharing data and functionality among heterogeneous systems. Service providers and consumers are loosely coupled and distributed across the network, either within an organization or across organizational boundaries, and therefore, performance becomes a major concern in such a distributed environment. Furthermore, XML is widely used as message format for service providers and consumers in Web services environment. XML message packaging and parsing brings extra overhead to both ends. Web services response latency, as well as throughput, is becoming a bottleneck problem. In this paper, We propose a consistency-preserving mechanism for Web services response caching, which reduces the volume of data transmitted without semantic interpretation of service requests or responses, and accelerates the services response finally. It achieves this reduction through the use of cryptographic hashing to detect similarities with previous results. Experiments with an initial prototype called SigsitAcclerator indicate that our mechanism can lead to significant performance improvement over more straightforward techniques.