Abstract:
The drastic increase in the usage of SMS technology has led to solutions that seek to enable users of mobile devices to access services through SMSs. This has resulted in the proposal of solutions towards SMS-based service invocation in service-oriented environments. However, the dynamic nature of service-oriented environments, coupled with sudden load peaks generated by service requests, poses a performance problem to the service provisioning environment such as service provider’s servers.
In this research work we adopted load balancing techniques to address this problem. In addition, we observe that service-oriented environments deal with different service clients requiring different service quality. So it was deemed necessary to design a client-aware load balancing approach for SMS invocation of services. This is realisable through the Client-aware Least Loaded Framework (CaLLF). CaLLF allows service clients to be served and distributed across service provider’s servers (infrastructure) according to their class of importance. CaLLF achieves this with the combination of prioritisation, over dimensioning of resources and a least loaded approach. The evaluation of CaLLF for scalability showed it can cope with increasing traffic while providing better performance compared to Round robin (RR), the currently used scheme. However, even though CaLLF achieves better results than RR, it does so at a higher cost in terms of the computational resources it uses. We also evaluated CaLLF for utility and observed that CaLLF can provide better utility for premium clients compared with non-client aware least loaded load balancing approach but this was achieved with a trade off on the utility of regular clients.
