Selecting Skyline Web Services from Uncertain QoS

Abstract

Quality of service (QoS) has been considered as a significant criterion for selecting among functionally similar Web services. Recent approaches focus on computing the skyline over a set of QoS attributes. This can completely free users from assigning weights to QoS attributes. However, these approaches are not sufficient in a dynamic Web service environment where the delivered QoS by a Web service is inherently uncertain. In this paper, we tackle the problem of skyline on uncertain QoS. We represent each QoS attribute of a Web service using a possibility distribution and introduce two skyline extensions on uncertain QoS called pos-dominant skyline and nec-dominant skyline. We then develop appropriate algorithms to efficiently compute both the pos-dominant skyline and nec-dominant skyline. Finally, we present our experimental results that show both the effectiveness of the introduced skyline extensions and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.