Inversion of Web Service Invocation using Publish/Subscribe Push-Based Architecture

Among enterprise application integration solutions, Web services technologies are promising technologies to achieve the interoperability in heterogeneous environments. However, traditional Web service invocation may lead to unnecessary network traffic, long response time, and bottleneck problems at service providers. While a publish/subscribe model provides an advantage of prompt notification which can eliminate unnecessary network traffic, its achievement in interoperability is limited. By integrating Web services technologies with a publish/subscribe model, a pull-based architecture and a pushbased architecture are mentioned in this paper. The pull-based architecture uses the integrated solution based on traditional Web service invocation, still the bottleneck problems at service providers are likely to occur. Therefore, we propose an alternative, the push-based architecture which presents an innovative approach of using inversion of Web service invocation. Instead of letting service clients invoke services at service providers as usual, the service clients simply wait for updated information from the service providers. Experimental results showed that the response time was significantly minimized and the bottleneck problems at service providers were eliminated in the push-based architecture. Thus, service providers can be very small and thin in ubiquitous computing such as sensor or mobile devices.