Web service QoS requirements

The major requirements for supporting QoS in Web services are as follows:

• Availability: Availability is the quality aspect of whether the Web service is present or ready for immediate use. Availability represents the probability that a service is available. Larger values represent that the service is always ready to use while smaller values indicate unpredictability of whether the service will be available at a particular time. Also associated with availability is time-to-repair (TTR). TTR represents the time it takes to repair a service that has failed. Ideally smaller values of TTR are desirable.
• Accessibility: Accessibility is the quality aspect of a service that represents the degree it is capable of serving a Web service request. It may be expressed as a probability measure denoting the success rate or chance of a successful service instantiation at a point in time. There could be situations when a Web service is available but not accessible. High accessibility of Web services can be achieved by building highly scalable systems. Scalability refers to the ability to consistently serve the requests despite variations in the volume of requests.
• Integrity: Integrity is the quality aspect of how the Web service maintains the correctness of the interaction in respect to the source. Proper execution of Web service transactions will provide the correctness of interaction. A transaction refers to a sequence of activities to be treated as a single unit of work. All the activities have to be completed to make the transaction successful. When a transaction does not complete, all the changes made are rolled back.
• Performance: Performance is the quality aspect of Web service, which is measured in terms of throughput and latency. Higher throughput and lower latency values represent good performance of a Web service. Throughput represents the number of Web service requests served at a given time period. Latency is the round-trip time between sending a request and receiving the response.
• Reliability: Reliability is the quality aspect of a Web service that represents the degree of being capable of maintaining the service and service quality. The number of failures per month or year represents a measure of reliability of a Web service. In another sense, reliability refers to the assured and ordered delivery for messages being sent and received by service requestors and service providers.
• Regulatory: Regulatory is the quality aspect of the Web service in conformance with the rules, the law, compliance with standards, and the established service level agreement. Web services use a lot of standards such as SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. Strict adherence to correct versions of standards (for example, SOAP version 1.2) by service providers is necessary for proper invocation of Web services by service requestors.
• Security: Security is the quality aspect of the Web service of providing confidentiality and non-repudiation by authenticating the parties involved, encrypting messages, and providing access control. Security has added importance because Web service invocation occurs over the public Internet. The service provider can have different approaches and levels of providing security depending on the service requestor.