Enterprise IT infrastructures and their interfaces to private partners and to the general public are migrating toward a service-oriented architecture, using Web Services (WS) as a de-facto implementation protocol. As a result, WS-generated traffic is expected to increase and have a considerable impact on the Internet. Despite the high amount of interest in WS, there have been relatively few studies regarding their characteristics.
In this survey, we analyze publicly-accessible WS using the information that we collected over a 3 month period. We study the evolution of WS and their geographic distribution, and message characteristics and response times of each WS. We closely analyze two popular WS sites: Amazon and Google. Some of our initial results contradict common intuition. The number of public WS has not increased dramatically, although there are signs which indicate intensive ongoing activities in the WS domain. The geographic distribution of public WS is largely skewed: about three fifths of public WS are located in USA. In contrast to existing Web content, WS response messages are just a little bigger than request messages, and the sizes of WS responses and their variation are smaller than those of the existing Web objects.
By: Su Myeon Kim, Marcel-Catalin Rosu
Published in: RC22999 in 2003
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