A Middleware Mediated Application Layer Protocol to Decouple Provider-Consumer Relationship in Web Services Orchestration and Its Application in Novel IoT Integration

Abstract

At present URI based web service orchestration poses a fundamental limitation on the nature of resulting web service applications restricting them to client-server paradigm and the partnership determination as a static design time activity. This naive simplicity limits the scope and capability of orchestration technology that shows up sorely in our inability orchestrate IoT devices using application level web service protocols/technology. This work suggests and demonstrates a middleware (named here as Open Interaction Middleware Services-OIMS) based web service orchestration approach that unfetter the client-server nature of orchestration and introduces run time establishment of provider-consumer relationship. OIMS mediated orchestration permits speech-act based specification and orchestration of partners of the collaboration. OIMS functionality deserves to be a part of the WS infrastructure eventually. Decoupled service orchestration permit creation of novel application layer level web services based protocols and applications – that has the merits of both bus and broker based protocols combined - such as in the case of Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring & integration. This work illustrates the proposed approach using a case study in integrating IoT devices belonging to multi class IP network that provides several important quality attributes such as loose coupling and scalability to the resulting environment.