A service path selection and adaptation algorithm for QoS assurance and load balancing in context-aware service overlay networks

As services are becoming more complicated, service providers face with tremendous difficulties in developing their services. In this environment, a lot of component functions are provided by multiple service providers, and the providers also desire to reduce costs for providing their services. A context-aware service overlay network CSON is a promising architecture to meet those demands by dynamically composing service paths and reconfiguring them based on various contexts. This paper proposes a service path selection and adaptation algorithm that assures quality of services QoS and balances the loads at the same time. The algorithm also dynamically adapts to an optimal service path when it detects a large amount of unexpected service loads over the service path. Since our algorithm is to solve a variation of multi-constrained path selection problem, which is known to be NP-complete, we formulate the problem using ant colony optimisation algorithm.