A Reservation-based Extended Transaction Protocol for Coordination of Web Services

Abstract

Web services can be used to automate business activities that span multiple enterprises over the Internet. Such business activities require a coordination protocol to reach consistent results among the participants in the business activity. In the current state of the art, either classical distributed transactions or extended transactions with compensating transactions are used. However, classical distributed transactions lock data in the databases of different enterprises for unacceptable durations or involve repeated retries, and compensating transactions can lead to inconsistencies in the databases of the different enterprises. In this article, we describe a novel reservation protocol that can be used to coordinate the tasks of a business activity. Instead of resorting to compensating transactions, the reservation protocol employs an explicit reservation phase and an explicit confirmation and cancellation phase. We show how our reservation protocol maps to the Web services coordination specification, and describe our implementation of the reservation protocol. We compare the performance of the reservation protocol with that of the two-phase commit protocol and optimistic two-phase commit protocol. We also compare the probability of inconsistency for the reservation protocol with that for compensating transactions.

Decentralized Communication for Data Dependency Analysis Among Process Execution Agents

“…The concept of a promise is used in Greenfield et al (2007), where a promise is an agreement between a client and a resource owner, allowing a service provider to offer assurances that resources will be available when they are needed. A reservation-based protocol is defined in Zhao, Moser, and Melliar-Smith (2005) where a process uses an explicit reservation phase to request resources, followed by an explicit confirmation/cancellation phase. By borrowing the trigger feature in active database, compensation rules are defined for all subtransaction operations in Strandenaes and Karlsen (2002).…”

An Automated Supply Chain Management System and Its Performance Evaluation

“…As infrastructure software that supports Web Services, MIDAS uses a Registry that allows a manufacturer to discover suppliers, to select suppliers dynamically, and to find alternate suppliers on demand if an existing supplier becomes unavailable, and to redirect its requests seamlessly to an alternate supplier. MIDAS uses a Reservation Protocol (Zhao et al, 2008) to improve the performance of business transactions that span multiple businesses in the supply chain. Use of the Reservation Protocol decreases the probability of inconsistencies for business transactions between manufacturer and suppliers.…”

Decentralized data dependency analysis for concurrent process execution

“…Acceptable Termination States (ATS) [2] are used to ensure user-defined failure atomicity of composite services. A reservation-based protocol is defined in [26], where a process uses an explicit reservation phase to request resources, followed by an explicit confirmation/cancellation phase. The concept of a promise in [7] is similar to the work in [26], where a promise is an agreement between a client and a resource owner, allowing a service provider to offer assurances that resources will be available when they are needed.…”

“…A reservation-based protocol is defined in [26], where a process uses an explicit reservation phase to request resources, followed by an explicit confirmation/cancellation phase. The concept of a promise in [7] is similar to the work in [26], where a promise is an agreement between a client and a resource owner, allowing a service provider to offer assurances that resources will be available when they are needed. Other techniques include Web Services Composition Action [14,15], WebTransact [11], and the work of [18], defining a model that supports features such as atomic transactions, pivot transactions, compensatable transactions, and re-triable transactions, as well as forward and backward recovery techniques.…”