| Abstract: |
Electronic commerce has attracted a great deal of attention recently. Among the different types of electronic commerce, business-to-business is the one most widespread in terms of turnover.
An important aspect in business-to-business e-commerce scenarios is how to meet response time and throughput requirements of applications in spite of execution taking place across corporate
boundaries and, in the future, via the Internet instead of using leased lines. Given the unpredictable variations of available bandwidth in todays Internet, providing Application Quality of
Service guarantees for these requirements is a complex task. Due to the current trend to run multimedia applications over the Internet, we assume that the future Internet will not only support
best effort service but also guaranteed service, e.g., via network resource reservation. This allows to take advantage of this service also for e-commerce applications. The problem remains
non-trivial due to the wide variations among application scenarios. As a first step towards implementing a generic solution, this paper proposes a scheme which enables virtual business processes
to meet response times and throughput requirements through network resource reservation. The paper describes the application scenarios we have in mind, the system where these ideas are being
implemented (WISE), and the mechanisms involved in providing Quality of Service guarantees at the application level. |
