The reliability of web services atomic commitment protocols

  • Authors:

  • Juha Puustjärvi

  • Affiliations:

  • Helsinki University of Technology, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Atomic commitment protocols ensure that a transaction terminates consistently, meaning that it either commits at all sites or aborts at all sites, even if failures occur during the protocol. We can evaluate atomic commitment protocols in many ways including resiliency and blocking. Resiliency indicates what failures the protocol tolerates while blocking indicates under what conditions the protocol can be blocked. Blocking is undesirable, because it can cause processes to wait for an arbitrary long period of time. Web service standards provide a means for developing atomic commitment protocols for composing Web services that are failure resilient but their shortage is that the processes may be blocked an arbitrary long period of time. In particular, this is the case in using WS-Atomic Transaction protocol for coordination and WS-ReliableMessaging protocol for messaging. In this paper, we present an atomic commitment protocol, called Reliable WS-Atomic Transaction, and its termination protocol, which is failure resilient and non-blocking as long as a failed site can communicate with a process that has received sufficient information to know whether the transaction will be committed or aborted. We also present how the protocol can be implemented by exploiting the WS-Coordination specification. The gain of the proposed protocol is that we can decrease the amount of blockings. On the other hand, the price to be paid is the introduction of a termination protocol, which is invoked by the atomic commitment protocol when it has been waiting a predetermined time for an anticipated message.