DISCIPLINE AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF CONSTRUCTING
SERVICE OVERLAY NETWORK
Junjie Tong, Meina Song, Junde Song and Ke Xu
School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
Keywords: Service overlay network, Discipline of constructing, Peer-to-peer technology.
Abstract: The economies of the world are shifting labour from agriculture and manufacturing into services, and
service is a trend of the future. To implement the service in the current existing networks, there have been
several frameworks or infrastructures and theories proposed. To facilitate the creation and deployment of
value-added Internet services, how to construct the service overlay network while considering the
bandwidth provisioning, QoS, services availability and etc. is coming up. In this paper, we propose the
discipline of constructing service overlay network basing on the theory of the service and relative theories,
and infrastructures considering the peer-to-peer technology and the content delivery network.
1 INTRODUCTION
Service Science integrates science, engineering and
management aims to study the service phenomena
occurred in human society, and develop service
systems for better society. (OLRSS) As the service
science developing, there many other theories have
been proposed to supplement and deepen its
discipline and theory. SSME (Service Science
Management and Engineering) is for studying the
service systems, and aims at the application of
scientific, management and engineering discipline to
improve service systems, particularly those involved
in complex, IT-enabled services. In the recent
decades, more and more academies and research
centres focus on it. On one hand, some people focus
on how to construct the curriculum to make it to be
an academic department and it is still an open
question. On the other hand, some people focus on
service computing, service engineering and service
model to evaluate and improve effectiveness basing
on the standard web service technologies and
service-oriented structures.
Service systems connect people, technology and
organizations with value-creation. They aim for
providing services operating on the computing
infrastructure for service clients in IT outsourcing
(Maglio et al., 2006). And as to implement the
service architectures and systems well, service
overlay network has also been proposed as an
effective means to address some of the issues
including end-to-end quality of service (QoS),
facilitating the creation and deployment of the
service applications. But as the existing Internet has
now become a large complex non-linear network.
Between network nodes, the node and data packet
protocols arise from the non-linear effects, as well as
cooperation and competition between users, so that
network behaviour showing a high complexity and
unpredictability (Chuang and Yuan, 2004). As the
developing of service science and service systems,
the Internet has not only used for keeping
connectivity of the nodes for service delivery but
also be concerned to construct overlay over the
existing network for evaluating and improving the
service quality, bandwidth provisioning , QoS,
services availability and etc. There many overlay
solutions and frameworks have been proposed as
focused on different effective issues.
Nowadays, voice and video streaming
transmissions have occupied most of the bandwidth
of the internet. And how to delivery the large size
contents with good performance, tolerant ability and
feasibility becomes a big problem. The p2p
technology has solved this problem to some extent,
but also brings other problems. So there is a trend to
combine the p2p technology and content delivery
network to solve the backups of the self-organized
p2p applications including lack of controllability and
manageability, particularly the expensive costs
between different ISP (Liu et al., 2008).
571
Tong J., Song M., Song J. and Xu K..
DISCIPLINE AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF CONSTRUCTING SERVICE OVERLAY NETWORK.
DOI: 10.5220/0003589605710575
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (SSE-2011), pages 571-575
ISBN: 978-989-8425-53-9
Copyright
c
 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

In this paper, we give some discipline or
principles of constructing the service overlay
network by defining and separating the different
roles on network and particularly explore the
infrastructures by implementing the service science,
service theory and service-oriented structures in the
streaming applications.
2 DISCIPLINE
In this section, we will give discipline on
constructing the service overlay network on the base
of the service and SSME theories. First, we define
the different roles in the service and its
corresponding responsibilities. Second, we define
the different roles at another side. At last, give some
discipline and principles of constructing service
overlay network.
2.1 In the Practical Environment
First, let’s consider the definition of service.
James Fitzimmons defines a service as “A
service is a time-perishable, intangible experience
performed for a customer acting in the role of co-
producer” (Fitzimmons, 2005).
And in (Gadrey, 2002), it defines the services in
terms of relationships and actions among service
provider, service client, and service target.
From the above theory, we define the roles in the
practical services including the service provider, the
service client and the service agent in this paper.
2.1.1 Roles’ Definition
The service provider: We can divide the service
provider into different kinds by different standards.
For example, we can divide them into individual,
organization service provider etc. And we also can
divide them into clothes, eating, housing and
travelling service providers. We consider the service
provider as the following definition: The entity has
certain resources or abilities to provide certain
services for the service clients directly or through
the service agents indirectly.
The service clients: We can also define the
service clients into different kinds by various
standards. On one hand, we can divide them into
individuals and organizations. And on the other hand,
we can divide them into the public and private
clients. But the essence of the service clients is: The
entity needs services and has the capability and
willing to pay for them.
The service agent is at the middle of the service
provider and the service client. On one hand, it
facilitates the service provider sells its service even
without thinking about the selling processing. On
other hand, it facilitates the service clients to use the
service with more comfortable and feasible
experience. But the service may flow directly to the
service clients without going through the service
agents.
2.1.2 Roles’ Responsibilities
The service provider, the service client and the
service agent construct an integrate service
environment. We list the three components’
conditions and responsibilities in Table 1.
Table 1: Conditions and Responsibilities of the Three
Components.
Conditions Responsibilities
Service
Provider
Constructing
the resources
Available
Service
Developing the
service basing
on the
resources
Maintain and
Evaluate the
services
Service
Client
Needs to use
No servicing
ability
Pay for the
services
Service
Agent
Communicating
between
providers and
clients
Integrated the
services
Effective
solutions or
means
Feasible and
comfortable
Environment
We define the components’ conditions and
responsibilities in the practice environment. But to
analyze and develop the service systems, we have to
change our point to figure the different roles in the
service processing.
2.2 In the Service Systems
In paper (Cai, 2007), it separates the service system
into three layers as shown in figure 1.
The above bottleneck structure is covering the
service requirements and lifecycles. And at the same
time, it proposes the corresponding components of
the service system including the service processes,
service information, service staffs and service
partners.
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Figure 1: The Three Layers of the Service System.
But the above structure isn’t considering the
network which plays a more and more important
role in nowadays systems.
2.2.1 Roles’ Definition
In the Internet, we can divide the system into the
following parts or processing: publish the service,
search the service, transmit the service and receive
the service. After all, we can use the service at the
client.
The Internet has to offer the abilities of
publishing, searching, transmitting and receiving the
service even integrating the services.
The entities can also be the three ones as
proposing before, but the roles’ condition and
responsibilities are changed a lot.
2.2.2 Roles’ Responsibilities
We emphases the functions of the Internet and we
concern much more about the roles and
responsibilities of the Internet while implementing
the service system.
Table 2: Considering the Role of the Internet.
Conditions Responsibilities
Service
Provider
Providing
computing and
caching abilities
Providing
available and
constant services
Change the
abilities into
various services
Service Client Needs Pay
No serving
ability
Accessing to the
agent or
provider
Service Agent Compose the
services
Publish, deliver
and adapt the
existing services
Make the
services
invisible and
feasible
2.3 Discipline and Principle
In this paper, we concern the role of the Internet in
designing and developing the service systems. And
as shown in the Table 2, the Internet can be
considered as the service agent between the service
provider and the service client. Its main goal is to
publish, deliver and adapt the services which the
provider provides and evaluate the performance and
other features.
In paper (Hai-hong et al., 2010), it proposes four
basic principles of services and service network
including: the invisibility and networking of services,
the differences and compatibility of service, service
reusability and service integration, loosely coupled
and autonomous of services. It lists the principles
from the essence of the service itself.
We propose the discipline or principle as the
Internet plays as an agent or a middleware in the
service systems.
As a service container. As there various service
providers provide various service in different deploy
environment, it is important and critical to recognize,
collect and compose the services. The Internet plays
as a container which can contain different services
without thinking about the differences of designing
and deploying the services.
As a service provider. As the client can get the
service from the service provider directly or get the
service from the service agent indirectly, we can
consider the service agent or the Internet as a special
service provider. The Internet plays as a service
provider, it has to publish and transmit the services
with corresponding mechanisms to ensure the
performance, quality of the services and other issues.
From the above description, we can figure out
the principles easily.
Integrate the service. It has to make the
differences invisible.
Publish the service. Let the client know the
services’ information and functions.
Transmit the service. As the complexity of
different network constructing and circumstances, it
has to enable the services arrive to the right address.
It at least contains services delivering and routing.
Make promise. On one hand, to ensure the
service availability, constant for the service clients,
the Internet should adopt some mechanisms or
solutions to promise the performance and users’
experiences. On the other, for itself, it has to take the
value and bandwidth provisioning into account.
DISCIPLINE AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF CONSTRUCTING SERVICE OVERLAY NETWORK
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3 NEW INFRASTRUCTURE
As the peer-to-peer attract more and more academic
and researching entities, we can consider using this
technology of constructing the service overlay
network. This can evaluate the services on the peer-
to-peer overlay and also expand the range of the
service overlay network.
In paper (Zhou et al., 2005), it proposes a service
overlay network framework called ALASA
(Application Layer Active Service Architecture) to
provide a solution for distributed on-demand
services across the Internet. It contains the following
main four functions: service description, service
discovery, service composition and service
reputation. The end user can use the service through
the service broker form the special service provider
after looking up the service in the service directory
first.
And other architectures have also been proposed
concerning the QoS (Song and Mathieu, 2007),
service availability (Lee and Kim, 2009) and other
issues. In paper (Kim et al., 2010), it enables the
service using DSON (Dynamic Service Overlay
Network) by composing a dynamic service overlay
network for in p2p environment.
In this paper, we consider the two important
computer resources: computing ability and
memorizing ability. We can use the peep-to-peer
technology and overlay network to provide the
computing and memorizing ability for the service
provided for the end users. We propose the
following infrastructure by dividing the Internet into
three layers.
Figure 2: The Three Layers of this Infrastructure.
The service manager receives and integrates the
service; assigns and manages the service agent for
the service client.
The service agent requests and manages the
service processing; constructs the basic service
nodes for serving the services.
The service node affords its computing and
memorizing abilities for processing the services.
And in the first layer, the service managers use
the p2p technology and facilitate the service
searching and service routing. It is also responsible
for service publishing.
In the second layer, the service agent request for
certain service nodes and acquires the authorization.
And then constructs the service nodes into peer-to-
peer overlay to facilitate the management and
computing.
The service invisibility, availability, integrating
can be deployed by the service managers. And
service fast routing and constant high performance
can be deployed by the service agents. And the
loosely located service nodes are important for
distributed computing and memorizing. And the
service provider can provide various accessing
means for the service manger recognize and
compose the services even providing the API or an
overlay network such as content delivery network
for providing contents.
And the p2p technology in the infrastructure is
important for the distributed idea combining with
service science and its implementation.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we propose the discipline of
constructing service overlay network basing on the
theory of the service and relative theories, and
propose a new infrastructure considering the peer-to-
peer technology and the content delivery network.
The Internet plays as a middleware between the
service provider and service client enabling the
service provider doesn’t have to concern the
different implementing environment and the service
client uses the services much more feasible and
comfortable.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the National Key project
of Scientific and Technical Supporting Programs of
China
(Grant Nos.2008BAH24B04, 2008BAH21B03;
the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(Grant No.61072060); the program of the Co-
Construction with Beijing Municipal Commission of
Education of China.
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574

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