A Collaborative QoS-Aware Service Evaluation Method for Service Selection

With the increasing deployment of functionally similar web services by different service providers, nonfunctional aspects, which are often referred to Quality of Service (QoS), play a vital role in ranking web services. Various users may have different priorities of QoS attributes. However, ordinary users are lacking in the ability to map their plain requirements to the obscure technical QoS metrics advertised by service providers. Moreover, the QoS information advertised by different service providers is untrustworthy due to various factors. Even after a painstaking analysis of the candidate services, users will still have a difficult time in the selection of services. To address the issue of web service selection, we propose in this paper a collaborative QoS-aware service evaluation method which is based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) theory. In our method, QoS data of services is recorded by past users according to their usage experiences. A potential user collects QoS information of services from past users. The service with the highest benefit to cost ratio among candidate services is selected through the aggregation of the collected QoS information. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of our proposal.