Minimal Traffic-Constrained Similarity-Based SOAP Multicast Routing Protocol

SOAP, a de-facto communication protocol of Web services, is popular for its interoperability across organisations. However, SOAP is based on XML and therefore inherits XML’s disadvantage of having voluminous messages. When there are many transactions requesting similar server operations, using conventional SOAP unicast to send SOAP response messages can generate a very large amount of traffic [7]. This paper presents a traffic-constrained SMP routing protocol, called tc-SMP, which is an extension of our previous work on a similarity-based SOAP multicast protocol (SMP) [11]. Tc-SMP looks at the network optimization aspect of SMP and proposes alternative message delivery paths that minimize total network traffic. A tc-SMP algorithm, based on an incremental approach, is proposed and compared for its efficiency and performance advantages over SMP. Simple heuristic methods are also implemented to improve results. From extensive experiments, it is shown that tc-SMP achieves a minimum of 25% reduction in total network traffic compared to SMP with a trade-off of 10% increase in average response time. Compared to conventional unicast, bandwidth consumption can by reduced by up to 70% when using tc-SMP and 50% when using SMP.