Efficient coordination of web services in large-scale multimedia systems

Interactive multimedia communication services, such as Skype, are complex and composed of software components typically implemented as web services. Efficient coordination of web services is challenging and expensive, due to the statelessness nature of web services, and because web services change over time. The existing protocols implementing web service transactions are inefficient. They waste resources due to their inability to selectively add/remove individual web services in transactions without incurring high overhead that affects the quality of multimedia sessions. We propose a simple and effective optimization to current web service transaction management protocols that allows individual web services to selectively participate in distributed transactions they contribute to. We implement the proposed approach in one of the largest multimedia communication services in the world, and find that it enhances the throughput of multimedia service distributed transactions by 36%, reduces failure rate by 35%, improves multimedia quality (Mean Opinion Score (MOS)) of succeeded transactions by 9%, and reduces the overall time required by all transactions by 35%.