A Simulation-Based Reliability Analysis Approach of the Fault-Tolerant Web Services

Service-oriented computing is emerging as a new way to developing the extensible computing system which evolves from the component-based software engineering. Reliability is an important factor for choosing, ranking and compositing Web services. As there are many web services provide the same function on the internet, applying the fault-tolerant strategies is an effective way to improve the reliability. However, the existing reliability analysis approaches for Web services are seldom considering the fault-tolerant strategies. Simulation-based approaches have been used to the component-based software reliability analysis which can study the different architecture and the impact of various failure behaviors. In this paper, the algorithms of discrete-event simulation for common used fault tolerant strategies of Web services are proposed. Based on these algorithms, the simulation-based reliability analysis approach is implemented. The ability of the simulation approach in complex failure scenarios is exhibited by several experiments.