QoS Management in Service-Oriented Architectures

The next generation of software systems will be highly distributed, component-based and service-oriented. They will need to operate in unattended mode and possibly in hostile environments, will be composed of a large number of 'Replaceable' components discoverable at run-time, and will have to run on a multitude of unknown and heterogeneous hardware and network platforms. This paper focuses on QoS management in service-oriented architectures in which Service Providers (SP) provide a set of interrelated services to service consumers, and a QoS broker mediates QoS negotiations between SPs and consumers. The main contributions of this paper are: the description of an architecture that includes a QoS broker and service provider software components, the specification of a secure protocol.