Priority scheduling of requests to web portals

Web portals work as a point of access to a large volume of information on the web. This paper focuses on the performance of Web portals in an E-commerce environment which involves the processing of a large number of users’ requests. It proposes a class-based priority scheme which classifies users’ requests into high and low priorities. In E-commerce, some requests (e.g. buy) are generally considered more important than others (e.g. search or browse). We contend that the requests received from a Web portal should generally get higher priority as such requests are more likely to lead to purchases. We believe that assigning such priorities at multiple service levels can improve the performance of Web portals’ requests of higher priority. The proposed scheme is formally specified and implemented, and performance results are obtained and compared to a server that does not prioritise requests. The results show significant performance improvements in the processing of high priority requests.

► Standard traffic modelling techniques may not work for interactive systems.
► Multi-agent simulation is an effective tool for investigating such systems.
► Results show the system exhibiting non-intuitive, emergent behaviour.