Service Composition Mechanism Research Articles

An efficient clustering mechanism towards large scale service composition in IoT

Internet of things (IoT) applications hinder heterogeneity at different levels, such as device level, usage level, and communication level. In this context, service-oriented architecture (SOA) facilitates limited supports for handling heterogeneity in IoT-based applications. This article proposes a clustered hypergraph colouring (CHC) approach for designing large-scale SOA (LSS). Two noble approaches (service clustering and composition) are discussed in LSS for satisfying the service consumers (SCs) requirements. A service clustering approach is presented for the clustering of homogeneous services. This mechanism enables to reduce the search time for the service composition mechanism. A service composition approach is described with some parameters. Further, the proposed approach is validated through an experimental setup by considering the factors such as the number of services, execution time, and memory size. The execution time of LSS is minimised as compared to normal or medium-scale SOA (NSS) due to the service clustering mechanism. The novelty of this work is to minimise the execution time in the large service domain during service composition.

Relevant Cybersecurity Aspects of IoT Microservices Architectures Deployed over Next-Generation Mobile Networks.

The design and implementation of secure IoT platforms and software solutions represent both a required functional feature and a performance acceptance factor nowadays. This paper describes relevant cybersecurity problems considered during the proposed microservices architecture development. Service composition mechanisms and their security are affected by the underlying hardware components and networks. The overall speedup of the platforms, which are implemented using the new 5G networks, and the capabilities of new performant IoT devices may be wasted by an inadequate combination of authentication services and security mechanisms, by the architectural misplacing of the encryption services, or by the inappropriate subsystems scaling. Considering the emerging microservices platforms, the Spring Boot alternative is used to implement data generation services, IoT sensor reading services, IoT actuators control services, and authentication services, and ultimately assemble them into a secure microservices architecture. Furthermore, considering the designed architecture, relevant security aspects related to the medical and energy domains are analyzed and discussed. Based on the proposed architectural concept, it is shown that well-designed and orchestrated architectures that consider the proper security aspects and their functional influence can lead to stable and secure implementations of the end user's software platforms.

Service-oriented architecture for Internet of Things: A semantic approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) aids an interconnection between systems, humans, and services to develop computation-intensive autonomous applications. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts have been used as defacto software architecture to develop IoT-based systems. Though SOA facilitates various benefits, several challenges exist for integration with IoT-based systems, including configurability, interoperability, and manageability. The ontology-based approach provides a semantically enriched and rigorous platform for interoperating different heterogeneous IoT-based systems and applications. The semantic modelling research has focused on IoT resource management without concerning the method of accessing and utilizing IoT information. In this context, an IoT-based large-scale SOA (IoT-LSS) ontology is proposed that supports interoperability, heterogeneity, flexibility, manageability, extendibility, scalability. This ontology integrates the concept of large-scale SOA (LSS) with semantic sensor network (SSN) ontology. Clinical decision support system (CDSS) ontology has considered as a case study to illustrate the proposed ontology. A detailed comparative analysis between the proposed system and several existing IoT-based service ontologies has been performed based on different characteristics. This analysis shows that IoT-LSS supports dynamic features and exposes to service with its different mechanisms. This article presents an ontological framework for the IoT service-based environment to efficiently use for service composition mechanisms in the large service domain.

SPASC: Strategy‐proof auction mechanism with cost and QoS incentive for service composition

AbstractIn cloud computing, service composition provides an appealing paradigm to compose existing single services into a powerful workflow. The critical issues in service composition is that service providers may lie about the service's cost and QoS for more profits. However, existing studies only address the issue of services' untruthful cost, none of the studies consider both the issue of untruthful cost and untruthful QoS. Thus, it is necessary to design an incentive mechanism to motivate service providers to offer services with the truthful cost and truthful QoS. To address the above challenging issues, we propose the strategy‐proof auction mechanism for service composition (SPASC), which can determine the winners and dynamically calculate the price of services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to design an incentive mechanism to motivate service providers to offer services with the truthful cost and truthful QoS in this field. Furthermore, we propose an auction algorithm to implement the SPASC. Both theoretical proof and the extensively experimental results validate that SPASC achieves the truthfulness and individual rationality. At the same time, the experimental results also prove that this mechanism can motivate service providers to offer services with the truthful cost and truthful QoS.

A strategy-proof auction mechanism for service composition based on user preferences

A strategy-proof auction mechanism for service composition based on user preferences

An energy efficient service composition mechanism using a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm in a mobile cloud environment

By increasing mobile devices in technology and human life, using a runtime and mobile services has gotten more complex along with the composition of a large number of atomic services. Different services are provided by mobile cloud components to represent the non-functional properties as Quality of Service (QoS), which is applied by a set of standards. On the other hand, the growth of the energy-source heterogeneity in mobile clouds is an emerging challenge according to the energy saving problem in mobile nodes. In order to mobile cloud service composition as an NP-Hard problem, an efficient selection method should be taken by problem using optimal energy-aware methods that can extend the deployment and interoperability of mobile cloud components. Also, an energy-aware service composition mechanism is required to preserve high energy saving scenarios for mobile cloud components. In this paper, an energy-aware mechanism is applied to optimize mobile cloud service composition using a hybrid Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (SFGA). Experimental results capture that the proposed mechanism improves the feasibility of the service composition with minimum energy consumption, response time, and cost for mobile cloud components against some current algorithms.

Evaluating IoT service composition mechanisms for the scalability of IoT systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm where practically every (physical and virtual) thing will be interconnected through innovative distributed services. Since the number of connected things is rapidly growing, IoT systems will require the composition of plenty of services into complex workflows. Thus, scalability in terms of the size of IoT systems becomes a significant concern. In this paper, we review and evaluate the fundamental semantics of existing IoT service composition mechanisms to determine how well they fulfil the scalability requirements of IoT systems. We identify scalability desiderata and, accordingly, our findings show that dataflows, orchestration and choreography do not fully satisfy such desiderata, unlike a novel composition mechanism called DX-MAN.

Collaborative Agent Communities for Resilient Service Composition in Mobile Environments

Automatic planning, with dynamic binding and adaptive composition recovery, has been used to tackle complex service provisioning in mobile environments, but given frequent network topology changes, and services with time-dependent QoS, finding composites that can functionally and non-functionally satisfy a user's request remains difficult. Many service composition mechanisms either require a centralised perspective of the environment, or use optimisation mechanisms that trade off computational efficiency for optimality. Stigmergy-based approaches have been used to model decentralised service interactions between service providers, using a community of mobile software agents that share the same goal to approximate the set of QoS-optimal service compositions. Inspired by this model, this article addresses computational efficiency concerns using a collaborative approach to engage multiple communities of agents for provisioning QoS-optimal service compositions in mobile environments. New compositions can emerge from local decisions and interactions with agents from diverse communities. We assess whether having multiple communities improves the diversity and optimality of solutions. We also measure the proposed approach’ efficiency in dealing with incomplete information. The results show that the proposed approach trades optimality for a more diverse set of solutions, at a cost of higher overhead.

Toward Efficient Service Composition Techniques in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is anticipated to bridge various technologies to allow new applications through linking physical things together in the future. Increasing facilities through the composition of services are considered as an essential module in this technology. Several types of services can be supplied in the IoT using the user’s requirements to consider the user needs. However, the service composition in the IoT does not have any systematic and complete study about examining its significant techniques. So, this paper aims to investigate the available methods in this field using a systematic manner. To achieve a comprehensive view of the topic, all of the selected approaches are divided into four distinct categories, including framework, service oriented architecture and RESTful, heuristic, and model-based. The detailed classifications have been presented using various parameters based on the examination of the existing techniques. Also, the benefits and drawbacks of the state-of-the-art service composition techniques and the important challenges of them are discussed. Finally, we have explained future work in the field of service composition in the IoT with detail in order to make an effective and efficient way for researchers in this area. We also have identified four important parameters to examine the selected service composition mechanisms in the IoT. Scalability is improved in 45.4%, execution time in 36.3%, cost in 27.2%, reliability in 22.7%, availability in 18.1%, and response time in 13.6% of the reviewed articles.

Formal verification approaches in the web service composition: A comprehensive analysis of the current challenges for future research

SummaryToday, service composition is emerging paradigm on the communication networks such as cloud environments, internet of things, wireless sensor network, and software‐defined network. The goal of service composition method is to provide the interactions between user requirements and smart objects of intelligent communication systems. There have been many efforts to use formal verification and behavioral modeling methods to evaluate the service composition mechanisms. Up to now, there is not a comprehensive analysis research on this topic. Therefore, this paper focuses on several formal verification approaches that are performed to confirm the service composition correctness in communication networks. The objective of this paper is to comprehensively categorize and examine current research techniques on formal verification of the service composition. This research analysis provides an overview of recent service composition approaches according to structural and functional properties. Comparison results show that most of the verification approaches in explanation of the service composition correctness are semantic‐aware approach with 43%. The most used verification method for the service composition is model checking with 69%. The process algebra is used 29%, and some theorem proving methods are applied in 9% of the investigated mechanism. Moreover, most widely used modeling tools are NuSMV (22%), SPIN (17%), CPN (12%), UPPAAL (12%), Event‐B (10%), and PAT (5%).

A Fast and Scalable Mechanism for Web Service Composition

In recent times, automated business processes and web services have become ubiquitous in diverse application spaces. Efficient composition of web services in real time while providing necessary Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees is a computationally complex problem and several heuristic based approaches have been proposed to compose the services optimally. In this article, we present the design of a scalable QoS-aware service composition mechanism that balances the computational complexity of service composition with the QoS guarantees of the composed service and achieves scalability. Our design guarantees a single QoS parameter using an intelligent search and pruning mechanism in the composed service space. We also show that our methodology yields near optimal solutions on real benchmarks. We then enhance our proposed mechanism to guarantee multiple QoS parameters using aggregation techniques. Finally, we explore search time versus solution quality tradeoff using parameterized search algorithms that produce better-quality solutions at the cost of delay. We present experimental results to show the efficiency of our proposed mechanism.

SERVICE COMPOSITION MECHANISMS IN THE MULTI-CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS: A SURVEY

Cloud computing is a serious technological creation in the area of information systems development that supplies the benefits of self-service applications, source mixing, and wide network access. Nowadays, cloud computing to support fastness, easy combination, and low-cost of distributed applications in dissimilar environments have become increasingly famous. Therefore, service combination is a growing method that proliferates the number of applications of cloud computing by reusing attractive services. In this article, we survey the service composition mechanisms such as all clouds, base cloud, smart cloud, COM2 and clustering algorithms which have been used in the cloud environments. Service composition methods can be applied in two main environments: single and multicloud where due to the importance of multi-cloud environments (MCE), some existing and important methods are analyzed in the multi-cloud environment in this article. This paper also provides a discussion of existing methods in terms of running time and finding the optimal cloud composition. Obtained results showed the performance of each method in some terms.

Mediation information system engineering based on hybrid service composition mechanism

Business-IT alignment nowadays has become crucial, with the expansion of service-based information systems and the need to collaborate with external partners. This research work therefore presents a hybrid service composition mechanism coupling logic-based and syntactic matchmaking of services and messages to transform a business process into an executable workflow. To meet the business requirements, this mechanism is based on both top-down and bottom-up approaches using available technical services and a generic semantic profile as pivot model. Whereas the service matchmaking focuses on the functional coverage of the generated workflow, the messageone generates the message transformation needed.

The Service Recommendation Method based on Semantic Technology in Ubiquitous Computing

In ubiquitous computing environments, users usually compose several services to achieve their goals. The service composition method of this paper is based on WSUN(Web Services on Universal Networks). WSUN approach supports dynamic service composition which takes account of the dynamic factors of ubiquitous environments. In service composition, an operation of a service should be substituted by another operation when the operation is not available. The substitutable operation should support same functionality of unavailable operation. Moreover, it should be able to communicate with pre operation and post operation. The service composition mechanism of WSUN considers the functional similarity between unavailable operations and substitutable operation, but it does not take account of I/O message structures and parameter types of operations. In order to enhance WSUN service substitution method, we use SAWSDL(Semantic Annotation WSDL for XML Schema), which is Semantic Web Services technique. SAWSDL provides two construct: modelReference and schemaMapping. A modelReference specifies the association between a WSDL or XML Schema component and a concept in some semantic data. Semantic annotations using modelReference help to discover substitutable operations. In addition, a schemaMapping solves the heterogeneity of I/O message structures and parameter types of operations. Consequently, even if the operation, which has same functionality of unavailable operation, has different I/O message structures and parameter types of unavailable operation. In order to recommend the operation has good quality, we define the quality of operation. It is a criteria that user can choose the best operation. In addition, we take a user weight for accommodation of user’s requirements. The recommendation system prioritizes operation through calculating quality of operation based on user weight value. Therefore, operation by operation’s priority recommends users. Our system supports substitutable operation discovery mechanism using Semantic Web Services technique, and substitutable operations list to satisfy user’s requirement recommend in ubiquitous environment. Therefore, user can discover substitutable operation in substitution situation. In addition, substitutable operations to fit user requirement recommend user according to weight value from user.

The Operation Recommendation based on QoS in Service Substitution Environment

In ubiquitous computing environments, users usually compose several services to achieve their goals. The service composition method of this paper is based on WSUN (Web Services on Universal Networks) [7]. It supports dynamic service composition which takes account of the dynamic factors of ubiquitous environments. In service composition, an operation of a service should be substituted by another operation when the existing operation is not available. The substitutable operation should support same functionality of existing operation. Moreover, it should be able to communicate with operation back and forth. The service composition mechanism of WSUN considers the functional similarity between unavailable operations and substitutable operation, but it does not take account of input and output message structures and parameter types of operations. In order to enhance WSUN service substitution method, we use SAWSDL (Semantic Annotation WSDL for XML Schema) [15], which is Semantic Web Services technique. SAWSDL provides two construct: modelReference and schemaMapping. A modelReference specifies the association between a WSDL or XML Schema component and a concept in some semantic data. Semantic annotations using modelReference help to discover substitutable operations. In addition, a schemaMapping solves the heterogeneity of I/O message structures and parameter types of operations. Consequently, even if the operation, which has same functionality of unavailable operation, has different I/O message structures and parameter types of unavailable operation. In order to recommend the operation has good quality, we define the quality of operation. It is a criteria that user can choose the best operation. In addition, we take a user weight for accommodation of user’s requirements. The recommendation system prioritizes operation through calculating quality of operation based on user weight value. Therefore, operation by operation’s priority recommends users. Our system supports substitutable operation discovery mechanism using Semantic Web Services technique, and substitutable operations list to satisfy user’s requirement recommend in ubiquitous environment. Therefore, user can discover substitutable operation in substitution situation. In addition, substitutable operations to fit user requirement recommend user according to weight value from user.

Agile Web Service Composition and Messaging approach for e-Government services

E-Government services are increasingly being deployed using service-based architectures. Individual web services, developed from legacy and modern firmware, are composed to achieve e-service delivery. Current web service composition approaches range from practical languages aspiring to become standards (like BPEL, WS-CDL, OWL-S and WSMO) to theoretical models (like automata, Petri nets and process algebras). In this work, current approaches were studied and a comparison of their features and weaknesses was carried out. It was observed that current composition mechanisms are static and not agile enough to cater for functional change in business needs. This paper proposes a new web service composition and messaging mechanism for electronic government services in which composition of web services is done dynamically to provide for more agility in government e-services. The proposed composition mechanism works on a software architecture which enables application software integration. This architecture has been developed to deploy end-to-end e-services to G2B, G2C and G2G users starting from legacy government software applications. Using the proposed approach, integrating back-end e-Government applications to deliver end-to-end e-services can be agile, simpler and faster. The main contribution of this paper is the novel dynamic web service composition mechanism.

A study on dynamic Semantic Web service composition

Description Logic possesses strong knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities and offers logical foundation for Semantic Web ontology languages such as OWL and OWL-S. However, the present implementations of OWL and OWL-S are deficient in semantic modeling for dynamic service composition. They also do not consider user preferences. AI planning possesses a better modeling capability of action state transformations in planning and provides an effective method for solving planning problem and task decomposition. However, it is limited in knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities. Based on merits of Description Logic, OWL-S and AI planning, this paper extends OWL-S model, proposes a service composition mechanism and testifies its feasibility in Description Logic. The results show that this composition mechanism is not only feasible but also helpful for semantic modeling of service composition in Semantic Web.

Modelling of combinable relationship-based composition service network and the theoretical proof of its scale-free characteristics

Existing works on service composition are primarily based on the requirements of service composition, such as describing language supporting service composition, service composition framework, mechanism and method for service composition, and service composition validation. Few works have been carried out from the perspective of combinable relationship among composite services and composition service network. This article emphasises on combinable relationship-based composition service network, i.e. CoRCS-Net. The principles for establishing and modelling CoRCS-Net were studied, and nine combinable relationships among services in CoRCS-Net were investigated and 14 elementary evolving operators for CoRCS-Net dynamic evolution were designed. According to the definition of scale-free network (SFN) and the investigations on its related research achievements, it is supposed that ‘CoRCS-Net is a scale-free network’ in this study. In order to prove the theoretical hypothesis, the concepts of combinable strength and variation of combinable strength were introduced, and combinable strength is used to describe the invoking times of a service being invoked for service composition. First we calculate the real time variation of combinable strength of an arbitrary service in CoRCS-Net, and then obtain the corresponding real time combinable strength and investigate its distribution for all services in CoRCS-Net. It is discovered that ‘like many nature and social phenomenon, CoRCS-Net is “scale-free”, and it is constructed by few “active services” and a great deal of “silent services”. In the process of service composition, the invoking times for majority services are very small, while only few services are invoked frequently, and the probability (or invoking times) for the services in a CoRCS-Net to be invoked for service composition decays as a power-law’.

Automatic and Effective Service Provision with Context-aware Service Composition Mechanism in Cyber-Physical Systems

Automatic and Effective Service Provision with Context-aware Service Composition Mechanism in Cyber-Physical Systems

Loosely coupled service composition for deployment of next generation service overlay networks

In order to provide various attractive services to users, a user-centric approach such as usergenerated contents and services and a platform which can create a service easily and efficiently have been studied and designed during the past two decades. The IEEE NGSON standard has defined a functional architecture that provides advanced overlay functions for value-added services by collaboration of services with features of context awareness, dynamic adaptation and self-organizing management. Its service composition mechanism is comparable with service oriented architecture. However, due to SOA's complexity, it has not become as popular for user-generated services and contents as so-called mashup technologies, which also provide attractive and simple service creation. In this article we propose the adoption of loosely coupled service composition into the NGSON framework that can easily integrate existing communications and data services with little to no dependence on the underlying implementation and service description language details. Furthermore, the NGSON prototype supporting our proposal is presented as a proof of concept and to verify its advantages for operators, service providers, and end users.