QoS broker-based trust model for effective web service selection

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a promising paradigm for software development due to its benefits in cost-efficiency, agility, and adaptability. One of the most important research topics in SOA is to identify appropriate web services for a service composition so as to fulfill business requirements. Services selection focuses on selecting best services among a bunch of services with same or similar functions but having different QoS (Quality of Service). Many previous approaches have been proposed to optimize service selection. However, in current research, quality values normally come from service providers, who have high possibility to exaggerate these data for advertisement. In addition, we also argue that reputation based on an average user rating is not enough to indicate the trust degree of web services and service provider. In this paper, we focus on solving these problems. First we describe a QoS broker-based service selection scenario. Based on the scenario, we propose a Trust model, which includes QoS model, decision model and trust correction. We apply a statistical method of Paired t-test to model trust correction. By experiments, we verify that web service capacity and trust corrections have significant effects on web service selection. We also verify that the proposed approach is better than traditional approaches in terms of consumer satisfaction degree on selected web services.