Addressing QoS issues in service based systems through an adaptive ESB infrastructure

As service-based systems operate in an increasingly distributed and dynamic environment, addressing Quality of Service (QoS) issues at runtime has become an important and difficult to achieve challenge. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), one of the current preferred middleware technologies to support the development of service-based systems, provides built-in mediation capabilities (e.g. message transformation and routing) that allow addressing several QoS requirements. However, the configuration of these capabilities cannot usually be performed automatically at runtime, which restricts the rapid responsiveness of the system. This paper proposes ESB-based solutions to address QoS issues in service-based systems. More specifically, the paper focuses on dealing with response time and service saturation issues. The solutions leverage ESB mediation capabilities and they can be automatically and dynamically applied at runtime. Additionally, the solutions are based on commonly supported ESB patterns, so they are likely to be applied in most ESB products.