A distributed aggregation and fast fractal clustering approach for SOAP traffic

The adoption of Web Services has increased tremendously by many network organizations. Although Web services as XML-based network applications provide significant advantages over other communication technologies in terms of interoperability and dynamic scalability, they suffer from congestion and bottlenecks as a result of the large demand and large XML messages. Aggregation of SOAP messages is one of the potential solutions to reduce network traffic by aggregating large numbers of messages (responses), minimizing their volume over the Internet. However, existing aggregation models only support this function at one node (Web server) and therefore they do not allow aggregation of SOAP messages at different servers as one collaborative technique. In this paper, a new distributed aggregation model is proposed to support aggregation of messages from several nodes that share the path of SOAP responses over the Internet. Furthermore, a fast fractal similarity-based clustering technique is proposed speeding up the computation of similar messages that can be aggregated together in order to achieve a higher reduction. The proposed models show significant results, with distributed aggregation outperforming regular aggregation, resulting in a 100% higher compression ratio. The fast fractal clustering has reduced the required processing time by 85% when compared to the classical fractal clustering technique.