QOS-AWARE MULTIMEDIA WEB SERVICES ARCHITECTURE
Ikbal Taleb, Abdelhakim Hafid
1
Network Research Laboratory, University of Montréal, Pavillon André-Aisenstadt
H3C 3J7, Canada
Mohamed Adel Serhani
2
Concordia University, 1455 Maisonneuve Blvd West, Montreal, Quebec,
H3G 1M8, Canada
Keywords: Web Services, End-to-End QoS, Web Services QoS Broker, Network Resource Management.
Abstract: Due to the increasing growth of Web Services, Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming a key issue in web
services community. Providers and clients need to use QoS-aware architectures to get/ensure end-to-end
QoS. The QoS delivery to clients is highly affected by the web service performance itself, by the hosting
platform (e.g., Application Server) and by the underlying network (e.g., Internet). Thus, even if web
services together with hosting platform provide acceptable QoS, they also require sufficient available
network resources to deliver end-to-end QoS. In this paper, we propose a solution approach to the problem
of end-to-end QoS support for web services. Our approach rely on the utilization of a web service, called
Network Resources Manager (NRM), to take care of the QoS support in the network connecting the client
host and the matching web service location. NRM either relies on the network QoS capabilities (e.g.,
Integrated Services, Differentiated Services, Multiprotocol Label Switching), if any, or uses a measurement-
based scheme to estimate the quality that can be delivered between the two locations. One of the key
differentiator of our solution is that it does not require any changes to the currently used infrastructure by
the users and web services providers.
1 INTRODUCTION
In Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), both
service providers and service users should be able to
define QoS related statements. This is needed to
enable QoS-aware service publication, discovery,
and usage. For web services, QoS concerns the non-
functional aspects of the service being provided to
the users.
Estimating and guarantying QoS are important
for both Web service (WS) clients and WS
providers. For clients, when selecting a suitable WS
prior to service usage, it is important to be informed
of the QoS status. For WS providers, it is a
competitive edge over others that provide the same
web services without QoS support.
Multimedia Web Services present additional
challenges that are different from those of traditional
Web services. QoS of a streaming session depends
on a combination of factors, ranging from the
characteristics of the streaming sources (e.g., link
capacity, availability, and offered rate) to the
characteristics of the network paths (e.g., available
bandwidth, packet loss rate, etc.).
The design of Network Resources Manager
(NRM) providing mechanisms, measurement
strategies and network information of interest to
realize high quality streaming sessions between WS
Clients and WS provider is therefore a challenging
task.
The proposed architecture aims at supporting
end-to-end QoS at two levels (server level and the
network level). For that purpose, it employs a third
party broker (Adel, 2004) to assure QoS
specification and monitoring at the server level, and
a third party NRM to guarantee the QoS at the
network level. Both components cooperate together
to support end-to-end QoS between providers and
their clients.
133
Taleb I., Hafid A. and Adel Serhani M. (2005).
QOS-AWARE MULTIMEDIA WEB SERVICES ARCHITECTURE.
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 133-139
DOI: 10.5220/0001236101330139
Copyright
c
SciTePress
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2
introduces web services and presents related work
on QoS in the context of Web Services (WSs)
including discussions on the limitations of existing
approaches. Section 3, describes the NRM
architecture. Section 4 presents the implementation
of the proposed architecture and the simulations-
based evaluation of NRM. Section 5 concludes the
paper and presents future research directions.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Web Services
A Web service is a software system identified by a
URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), whose public
interfaces and bindings are defined and described
using XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Its
definition can be discovered by other software
systems. These systems may then interact with the
Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition,
using XML based messages conveyed by Internet
protocols. (Web Service Architecture, 2003)
A web service is invoked from any application;
but executed in the remote host server. Web services
usually use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a
fundamental communication protocol which carries
exchanged SOAP messages between clients and web
services.
Web Services (WSs) provide a new architecture
paradigm for building distributed computing
applications based on XML. The
Web service
functionalities are exposed through an interface
description and are publicly available for use by
other programs. Web services make use of standard
Internet protocols, such as: SOAP (Simple Object
Access Protocol) which is an XML based protocol
for messaging and remote procedure calls. WSDL
(Web Services Description Language) which is a
formalized XML based language for describing web
services. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery
and Integration) which is specification for
publishing and discovering web services description
through public registries.
Web Services Architecture, is based on the
interactions between three roles: service provider,
service registry, and service requester. The
interactions involve publish, find, and bind (interact)
operations.
2.2 Related Work
Research on web services has focused more on
functional and interfacing issues, i.e., Simple Object
Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description
Language (WSDL) and Universal Description,
Discovery and Integration (UDDI). Recently, QoS
issues began receiving more attention from the web
services community. QoS is not new to distributed
computing systems community, but in web services
there are new issues related to web services
properties. For web services, QoS have to include
network properties according to the public network
(i.e., Internet). Clients are using Internet to invoke
web services; currently, the Internet treats all traffic
equally as ‘best effort’ and provides no support for
QoS.
A sizeable amount of research on Web services
QoS concern semantic definition of web services
and QoS constraints. DAML-S (DAML-S, 2002)
supports semantic description of web services,
including specification of functionalities and QoS
statements. IBM introduced (Keller, 2002) WSLA
(Web Service Level Agreements), which is an XML
specification of SLA (Service Level Agreement) for
Web Services, focusing on QoS constraints. A
Carleton University group (Tosic, 2003) developed
the Web Service Offerings Language (WSOL) for
the formal specification of various constraints,
management statements, and classes of service for
Web Services. None of those address the problem of
providing end-to-end QoS when a web service, that
satisfies the user QoS requirements, is invoked.
A. Shaikh Ali and al. (Ali, 2003) from Cardiff
University propose UDDIe, as a new registry and an
extension to the UDDI standard. UDDIe supports
the recording of user defined properties associated
with a web service, and to enable its discovery based
on these properties. This work extends the UDDI to
integrate QoS descriptions and search-operations
capabilities. However, when a web service, that
satisfies the user QoS requirements, is selected, there
is no guarantee that the network will support the
requested QoS. For example, if the published audio
quality of a web service (e.g., music player) is “CD
quality and the user requires audio quality of “CD
quality”, the web service will be selected as
satisfying the user requirements; however, the user
will get this quality only if the network has enough
availabe resources to provide this quality.
M. Tian et al. (Tian, 2003) introduce a scheme of
QoS integration in web services. It is based on an
XML schema for Web Services QoS definition; it
includes mechanisms for efficient selection of QoS-
aware web services, support of dynamic QoS
mapping at runtime, and support of instant QoS
information delivery. They introduce an entity,
called QoS proxy, which is located between the
transport layer and the web service layer. Its role is
to mark outgoing packets in the case of DiffServ
(Blake, 1998) enabled network. It can be also used
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with other networking technologies, such ATM and
UMTS. The main drawback of this approach is that
it requires changes to the protocol stack in all
involved entities (i.e., users and providers). This is
in addition to security concerns; indeed, malicious
users can mark their outgoing packets to get the best
service available (e.g., Expedited forwarding).
In this paper we present an architecture that
allows the service broker to select web services that
can be delivered while satisfying the user end-to-end
QoS requirements. Our proposed architecture does
not require any changes to the protocol stack of
involved entities. Indeed, our proposed approach is
based on a web service, called Network Resource
Manager (NRM), that is responsible of ensuring that
the network (between the selected web service and
the user) supports its part of the required end-to-end
QoS. NRM is invoked only when the web service
provider provides its part of the required QoS (e.g.,
in terms of CPU of the server executing the web
service). Thus, our proposed architecture extends
exiting approaches (e.g., UDDIe) to support end-to-
end QoS. For example, when UDDIe returns one or
more web services that satisfy the user requirements
including QoS requirements, NRM can be used to
identify the web service, if any, that when invoked
will satisfy the user end-to-end QoS requirements.
The Network Resources Manager (NRM) is a web
service capable of measuring and checking end to
end QoS properties that helps in selecting suitable
web services.
3 NRM WEB SERVICE
The Network Resource Manager (NRM) is a
fundamental addition to the WS QoS-based broker
Architecture (Adel, 2004); it is involved in a number
of the broker’s tasks. It will play a major role in
delivering end-to-end QoS guarantees in SOA.
As a Web Service, the NRM publishes its
interface description in the UDDI/UDDIe registry to
respect the Service Oriented Architecture. Once
available via registries, interested components can
invoke their operations.
The NRM WS performs a number of key
operations that are necessary in supporting the
operations of the QoS broker. Its main objective is
the support of QoS in the network that is used to
deliver the requested web service from the
provider’s web service hosting platform to the user’s
location.
The key task of NRM is to assist the WS QoS
Broker in the web services selection process in
response to a user request. Indeed, when the QoS
broker identifies list of web services that satisfy the
user requirements, it invokes the NRM to check the
capability of the network, between the web service
location and the user location, to support he required
QoS.
NRM implements the SOAP handler class to
intercept messages coming from the broker (Figure
1). Upon receiving an invocation request, the
handler forwards the request to the NRM analyzer
that parses the request and extracts information of
interest, such as QoS parameters and their values.
Then, the analyzer sends the extracted information
to the NRM Mapper that performs mapping of QoS
parameters provided by the broker and QoS
parameters of the network. The Mapper provides the
NRM checker with the QoS parameters to be
supported by the network.
NRM (or rather the NRM checker) uses a
number of mechanisms to realize this task. If the
underlying network supports QoS, such integrated
services (IntServ (Braden, 1994)) or differentiated
services (DiffServ (Blake, 1998)), then NRM uses
these capabilities to support QoS. For example, in
the case of IntServ, it uses RSVP (Braden, 1994)
(Resource Reservation Protocol) to make the
necessary resources reservation to meet the required
QoS. In the case of DiffServ enabled network, it
marks outgoing packets according to the required
QoS (e.g., use Expedited Forwarding (EF) marking
to support voice/video) to provide differentiated
Figure 1: Broker and NRM interactions
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135
services or it can use the services of a bandwidth
broker (Stattenberger, 1998), if any, to provide, if
possible, the required QoS.
In cases where no such mechanisms are
supported by the network, NRM (monitor in
Figure1) makes use of measurement techniques to
estimate the state of the network between the web
service location and the user location; it uses for
example probes to measure the delay and loss rate
between the two locations.
NRM also performs periodic measurements
between different points in the network to gather
statistics about the state of the network; the results of
the measurements, stored in the NRM database, can
be used to estimate/predict the state of the network
and thus helps in estimating the QoS that will be
likely delivered between two points in the network
(e.g., between a web service and a user location)
3.1 Operations Scenario
We assume that there is a number of WS Providers
that have published their MWS (Multimedia Web
Services) using a UDDI standard registry, or an
UDDIe [4] registry to integrate QoS Data within the
published WSDL. A web portal (i.e., a web based
user interface) allows users to search for web
services (e.g., video-on-demand). More specifically,
the user enters a description of the service he/she is
looking for. (Video on demand) including QoS
requirements. The following steps are executed:
The client (Web/Java Application) searches and
binds to the QoS broker web service; then, it invokes
the QoS broker with the user request as an attribute
(arrow 1 in Figure 2).
The BWS starts a process to retrieve a list, L, of
WSs, from UDDI registries, that match the user
requirements including QoS requirements (arrows 2
and 3).
The BWS considers the first web service, MWS,
in L and calls the NRM web service to check
whether there are sufficient available network
resources to support MWS between MWS location
and the user (arrow 4). Note that before invoking
NRM, BWS searches and binds to NRM; NRM is
just another web service.
The NRM WS analyzes the BWS Request and
identifies key information it needs to process the
request (arrow 5); examples are: IP address of the
user, IP address of the server running MWS, and the
requested QoS attributes.
If the network connecting the user and MWS is
QoS-enabled, then, NRM will make use
protocols/schemes provide by the network. If the
network is IntServ-enabled, thus, NRM will use
RSVP to make resources reservation between the
user and MWS. If the network is DiffServ-enabled,
then NRM will mark the outgoing packets (e.g.,
video traffic generated by MWS) according to the
requested QoS or will make use of the network
bandwidth brokers if they are available. If the
network is not QoS aware, then NRM use probes to
check the status of the network (or rather network
path) between the user and MWS. In the prototype
implementation of NRM (see Section 5), NRM
marks outgoing packets assuming that the network is
DiffServ enabled.
If NRM is successful in reserving the required
resources or estimates (in the case the network is not
QoS aware) that there are enough resources to
support the request, it returns an accept response to
BWS; otherwise, it returns a rejection (arrow 6).
If BWS receives a rejection, it considers the next
web service in the list L and calls NRM and repeats
the same process (arrows 4 and 5). This process ends
when an accept response is received or when all web
services in the list L are considered without any
success. In the case of an accept, MWS is returned
to the user; in he other case, a rejection is set to the
user
If the user receives a rejection, then it gives up or
changes his/her request in terms of QoS
requirements (i.e., starts a renegotiation); otherwise,
he/she uses the WSDL document provided by the
Broker (arrow 7) to bind to MWS and invokes the
service (arrow 8). Then, the provider server starts
media streaming towards the client using RTP
protocol (arrow 9).
NRM can be as complex and/or as sophisticated
as the NRM providers want. For example, NRM can
support advance reservation (Hafid, 2005); in this
case, in response to BWS invocation, NRM checks
resources availability across all the involved
networks, computes, and returns to BWS the QoS
that can be supported for the time the request is
made (i.e., immediately), and at certain later times
carefully chosen. As an example, if the requested
QoS cannot be supported for the time the service
request is made, the proposed approach allows to
compute the earliest time, when the user can start the
service with the desired QoS.
4 IMPLEMENTATION
We implemented a Multimedia web service (i.e.,
video-on-demand) that provides users with the
functionality of selecting and playing a movie.
Movies and their metadata are stored in a MySql
local database. We implemented in MWS several
functions to access data and to send and receive
Media contents.
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We also implemented NRM as a web service that
uses DiffServ marking (Blake, 1998) to provide
acceptable video quality. The underlying network,
connecting users and our MWS instances is DiffServ
enabled.
In our prototype implementation, we used Bea
Weblogic (Bea WebLogic, 2004) Workshop to
design web services with a J2EE compliant
environment. The Weblogic Server is the main
platform deploying and publishing web services.
The Java Media Framework API is included to send
Video-Audio content via the network (internet). JMF
(JMF, 2004) uses RTP protocol (UDP based) to
transmit and receive data.
The user is provided with different classes of
QoS, he/she can select when requesting a movie;
each class of QoS is characterized by the cost of the
bandwidth (see Table 1). For example; a high quality
video requires 5 Mbps; thus, to support high quality,
the video server should have the resources to support
the high quality and the network path, between the
user and the video server, should allow for the
transmission of 5 Mbps.
Table 1: Offered Services
QoS
Classes
Video
Quality
Cost
Bandwidth
needed
Class 1 High 5$ 5mbps
Class 2 Good 2$ 2mbps
Class 3 low 1$ 100 kbps
To check whether the WS provider is able to
support a user request, we assume the existence of a
table that specifies the maximum numbers of users
that can be supported given a QoS class (the
capacity of a service to support a given number of
clients can be easily measured; thus, we can drop the
table assumption). It also keeps track of the number
of users using the service. With this information, one
can easily infer whether a new request can be
supported or not by the video server. For the
network QoS support, NRM marks video packet
with Expedited Forwarding (EF) marking to assure
better QoS for video traffic.
Table 2: Example of Video Server availability
QoS
Classes
Video
Quality
Available
ports
Max
ports
Used
ports
Class 1 High 2 5 3
Class 2 Good 14 15 1
Class 3 low 10 25 15
Total 26 45 19
Figure 2 depicts the interactions between the
different components of the prototype
implementation. Numbered arrows represent the
order of interactions in time. Each arrow includes a
description of the corresponding interactions; for
example, arrow (1) depicts the invocation of the web
service broker by the client while arrow (9) depicts
the video streaming using RTP.
Figure 3 shows the multimedia web service
interface to the client; indeed, when the client binds
to the selected web service (in this case a video-on-
demand service), it is provided with graphical user
interface to select the movie he/she wants to play.
Figure 2: Architecture Components
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137
4.1 Simulations
We run simulations to evaluate the video quality
delivered to the user using our prototype with NRM
and without NRM support; the objective is to show
that when NRM is used the user is assured to get
better QoS. In fact, when the network is overloaded
with traffic of other applications (such as FTP), if
NRM is not used, the user receives degraded QoS
(the video traffic is not marked accordingly). In the
case, NRM is used, the user receives the requested
QoS; in this case, NRM marks the video packet with
EF marking.
The network test-bed makes use of a local area
network, consisting of computing nodes and routing
elements. Figure 4 depicts the network setup, with
the computing nodes representing the user, the video
server, and the QoS Broker with the NRM web
service. For the routing elements we used the
iproute2 package in the Linux operating system,
which has DiffServ capability. The network link
between the two routers has a capacity of 0.75
Mbps.
In Figure 4, NRM uses Router capabilities to
mark outgoing packets from the server, towards the
user machine, with the appropriate marking (i.e.,
Expedited Forwarding: EF (Blake, 1998)). It does so
by accessing the router, via Telnet, and performing
the required configuration.
Figures 5.a shows the loss rate incured, between
the video server and the user, by two video flows.
Each flow is generating 0.4 Mbps of video traffic
(thus, execeeding the capacity of the network link).
The video flows started without involving NRM;
indeed, the QoS broker selects the web service
(video server in this example) based on the
functionality requirements and QoS requirements of
the web service provider (in this case the capacity of
the video server to serve the users). The flows
receive Best Effort (BE) service. Both of the flows
incur losses (see Figure 5.a); thus, the QoS delivered
to the user is degraded and does not meet his/her
(end-to-end) QoS requirements.
Figure 5.b shows the loss rate incured between
the video server and the user of two flows; each flow
is generating 0.4 Mbps of traffic. The first flow
Figure 3: VoD Web Service Client
Figure 4: Testbed Setup
Loss rate for BE VoD source2
Loss rate for BE VoD source1
Loss rate for EF VoD source2
Loss rate for BE VoD source1
a
b
Figure 5: Loss Rate of two BE flows and EF and BE
flows.
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starts generating traffic without involvement of
NRM; thus, it receives BE treatement by the
network. The second flow starts generaing traffic
with NRM involvement; indeed, NRM receives a
request from QoS broker (in response to a user
request to watch a movie) to check the availability of
resources to deliver video traffic at 0.4 Mbps. NRM
sends an accept response to start the second flow
(video traffic) after configuring the router (to which
the video server is connected) to mark the packets
belonging to the second flow with EF. Figure 5.b
shows that the second flow does incur no data
losses; only the first flow incures data losses (BE
flow). The reason is that the router treats EF traffic
differently than BE traffic; it processes/forwads
packets marked with EF first before
processing/forwarding packets marked with BE.
These two simple scenarios show the need for
NRM to provide end-to-end QoS for web services.
Even if web services providers have the hosting
platform with the capacity to provide QoS to their
users, they will not succeed in satisfying end-to-end
QoS without taking into account the QoS support in
the network(s) connecting their hosting plaform to
their users. NRM web services can be used to fill the
network QoS gap that exit in today’s web services
deployment.
5 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a solution approach to
the problem of end-o-end QoS support for
multimedia web services. Our solution does not
require any changes to the currently available
infrastructure of the users and web services
providers. More specifically, we presented the
design and implementation of Network Resources
Manager web service. It is just another web service
that is published in web services registries. It is
searched, retrieved, and invoked by the web service
broker. Its main role is the support, if possible, of
QoS in the network connecting the matching web
service location and the user location. The QoS
support depends on the network capabilities in terms
of QoS support (e.g., DiffServ-enabled, IntServ-
enabled, and MPLS-enabled). If he network is not
QoS-aware, NRM uses measurement-based
approach to estimate the QoS between the two end
points.
We are currently working to enhance/improve
the capabilities of NRM including QoS renegotiation
and advance reservation of resources.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Youcef Khene, from
University of Paris VI, France, for his help running
the simulations.
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