A Measurement framework for the parameterization of performance models of SOA-based systems

Distributed applications are rapidly converging towards the adoption of a computing paradigm based on service-oriented architectures, according to which an application can be seen as a composite web service that is built by assembling a set of existing services, executed on internetworked server hosts. In such a context, service providers are strategically interested both to describe the performance characteristics of offered services, to better qualify their offer and gain a significant advantage in the global marketplace; and to predict the level of performance that can be offered to service consumers. To this purpose, the paper introduces a framework for the management of performance parameters, defining the architecture that enables service providers to measure and make available performance information about the offered services. On the other hand the proposed approach allows the service consumers to automatically retrieve the performance data and then use such data to apply model-driven approaches for the performance analysis of composite web services.