Investigations On Some Aspects of Reliability of Content Based Routing SOAP based Windows Communication Foundation Services

1. Introduction

Service oriented architecture (SOA) offers guidelines for building loosely coupled distributed applications. SOA is a software pattern that defines the reusable business components, loosely coupled services to sustain the requirements of software users (Siew et al, 2006). The common implementation of SOA is the web service (WS) technology. WS is a software component, means to support interoperating machine to machine interaction over the internet. The interfaces are described in a machine process able Web Service Description Language (WSDL) format (W3C, 2015). Microsoft released a SOA based Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) as part of the .Net Framework 3.0 by integrating the existing technologies into a single application programming interface (API) in the form of WCF services. WCF is a unified framework for implementing, configuring and deploying distributed SOA applications using a set of classes placed at the top of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The existing different distributed technologies like Active Server Method and XML (ASMX), .NET Framework remoting, Microsoft Enterprise Services and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) are unified in one umbrella of WCF. Client can access loosely coupled services through the use of WSDL irrespective of platform, from which the service is hosted. WCF supports many advanced WS-Security specifications, such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Automatic Transaction, WS-Secure Conversation, WS-Trust etc. WCF .NET facilitates the development of distributed and interconnected applications based on SOA (Markus et al, 2010). WCF has been designed to provide manageable approach to distributed computing, interoperability and service orientation in varied systems maintaining security and reliability of services (Mistry et al, 2011). WS is becoming more prevalent and needed to ensure the quality of service (QoS) oriented systems. Software engineers have frequently talked about a metric, in practice, called as reliability. Software reliability is one of the predominant qualities of service factor that effects in overall WS of a system. Thus the reliability of software becomes a major concern of the companies as unreliable software may lead to huge economic loss to an organization. The software failure is not confined to software only, it also depends on hardware too, and hence it is essential to assess the reliability of software in parallel to hardware reliability. The software reliability is a probabilistic assessment that can be defined as the probability of failure free operation that does not cause a failure for specified period of time for a specified environment (Goel, 1985). Using analytical models, software reliability can be estimated and it helps to develop high quality of software. In this paper we emphasize on reliability analysis of the data acquired in our experiment.