The Use of Similarity & Multicast Protocols to Improve Performance

SOAP technology is being used in many distributed systems nowadays, however its areas of application are limited by high latency and high protocol overheads. For messaging in environments with high-volume transactions (e.g. stock quote and multimedia applications or in mobile and wireless networks), bandwidth-efficient communication is imperative. When there are many transactions requesting similar service operations, using unicast to send SOAP response messages can potentially generate very large amount of traffic. To improve SOAP’s performance, SOAP network traffic needs to be reduced. This chapter presents an approach to address this issue and to improve overall SOAP performance. A similarity-based SOAP multicast protocol (SMP), which reduces the network load by reducing the total generated traffic size, is described. In particular, SMP reuses common templates and payload values among the SOAP messages and only sends one copy of the common part to multiple clients. The results obtained from the experiments indicate that SMP can achieve up to 70% reduction in network traffic compared to traditional SOAP unicast.