An efficient composition of Web services with active network support

Composition of Web services enables collaboration among autonomous business organisations such that they can integrate their services to perform collaborative business activities. It facilitates the development of new services using pre-existing Web services thus reducing development and operational costs. However, the highly distributed, dynamic, and autonomous nature of component Web services gives rise to various issues such as service matchmaking, reliability, availability, security and efficiency. This paper presents a new protocol in order to improve the efficiency of Web services composition. The proposed protocol is based on the peer-to-peer paradigm which exploits the capabilities of underlying networks such that part of the processing is carried out at the network nodes. Efficiency of the proposed protocol is tested through various experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol significantly improves performance by reducing the system response time in the composition of Web services.