MagEl: A Magneto-Electric Effect-Inspired Approach for Web Service Composition

Web service composition is the art of combining multiple platform independent and modular pieces of software with varied configurations, to achieve an efficient solution for a complex business process. Though, web service composition has been an important area of research in the last decade, however the issue is expected to exacerbate in the 'Future Internet', as it is expected to house billions of services, with thousands offering the same functionality. In this context, maintaining an operational and solid set of Web service configurations will be a challenging task. Moreover, a centralized solution for Web service composition in the Future Internet scenario would be another issue. In this paper, we present a technique inspired from ElectroMagnetism in physics to create an environment which facilitates the selection of a service from a set of similar services. The proposed model achieves service composition in a decentralized environment without involving a centralized orchestrator. To validate the proposed technique in-silico experiments were conducted whose results demonstrate good performance in terms of completion time and load balancing. Further, the proposed technique is validated in-house (within our Institute's Intranet and with real users) by deploying real Web services on decentralized nodes. The results obtained via simulation are verified through a prototype based on the proposed model. We present, discuss and compare the effectiveness of the proposed work in the results section.