Role-based Quality of Service for Web Services

We have designed and implemented a prototype system providing role based Quality of Service (QoS) for Web services in heterogeneous networks. We leverage industry standards to the fullest extent, in an attempt to bring role based QoS support to standard Web services. We have extended an existing enterprise service bus to accommodate the changes necessary for prioritization on the server side, and created a custom client library to ensure prioritization in both the request and the response of the Web services message exchange. Finally, roles are defined using Security Markup Assertion Language (SAML) tokens. Our framework has been released as open source. Our evaluation shows that the concept is viable, and that prioritization on the application level of the OSI model, combined with network level prioritization as provided by DiffServ, is beneficial in networks with low bandwidth.