UsageQoS: Estimating the QoS of Web Services through Online User Communities

Services are an indispensable component in cloud computing. Web services are particularly important. As an increasing number of Web services provides equivalent functions, one common issue faced by users is the selection of the most appropriate one based on quality. This paper presents a conceptual framework that characterizes the quality of Web services, an algorithm that quantifies them, and a system architecture that ranks Web services by using the proposed algorithm. In particular, the algorithm, called UsageQoS that computes the scores of Quality of Service (QoS) of Web services within a community, makes use of the usage frequencies of Web services. The frequencies are defined as the numbers of times invoked by other services in a given time period. The UsageQoS algorithm is able to optionally take user ratings as its initial input. The proposed approach has been validated by extensively experimenting on several data sets including two real data sets. The results of the experiments have demonstrated that our approach is capable of estimating QoS parameters of Web services, regardless of whether user ratings are available or not.