Service Discovery Using Communication Fingerprints

A request to a service registry must be answered with a service that fits in several regards, including semantic compatibility, non-functional compatibility, and interface compatibility. In the case of stateful services, there is the additional need to check behavioral (i.e. protocol) compatibility. This paper is concerned with the latter aspect. For speeding up compatibility checks which need to be performed on many candidate services, we propose an abstraction of the behavior of each published service that we call communication fingerprint. The technique is based on linear programming and is thus extremely efficient. We validate our approach on a large set of services that we cut out of real world business processes.