Towards Network-Aware Service Composition in the Cloud

Composing several API-defined services into one composite service per user requirements has become an important service creation approach in the cloud-enabled API economy. Various service selection approaches in support of service composition on demand have been proposed. They usually assume that networking resources are over-provisioned and their usage needs not be considered when making quality-aware service composition decisions. In practice, these approaches often lead to wasteful network resource consumption and impractical end-to-end QoS optimality for cloud-based services. This paper proposes a network-aware cloud service composition approach, named NetMIP, with comparative experimental evaluations for the clouds that adopt the widely deployed fat-tree network topology. By formalizing the service composition goal as a multi-objective constraint optimization problem, we have validated the proposed approach can be used to effectively reduce network resource consumption and deliver QoS optimality while satisfying the end-to-end QoS constraints for the candidate composite services in the cloud. The comparative experimental evaluations are done via a credible cloud infrastructure simulation system, named WebCloudSim. Extensive evaluation results show that NetMIP outperforms several representative cloud service composition approaches in terms of network resource consumption, QoS optimality, and computation time under various service selection workloads and fat-tree network topology settings.