British Telecommunications Public Limited Company

British Telecommunications Corporation

Michal Jakob

Alexander L Healing

Fabrice Saffre

Fabrice T P Saffre

Fabrice Tristan Pierre Saffre

Alexander Laurence Healing

A peer-to-peer network operating in accordance with a service-oriented architecture is disclosed. The peers in the network request services from one another and each keep a record of the quality of service they receive from the other peers. The peers can operate in two modes of service provider selection. In a first mode, the selection is so as to favor service providers which have provided the peer with good service in the past. In a second mode, the selection is probabilistic and can therefore select service providers other than those that have provided good service in the past. Each device keeps track of the relative success of adopting the second mode of selection. By occasionally using the second mode of selection and adopting the second mode of selection more frequently should the relative success of adopting the second mode of selection rise, a more rapid adjustment by the network to changing network conditions is enabled. This leads to a better utilization of the resources of the computers of the network than has hitherto been achieved. The invention finds particular application in distributed applications which dynamically select a Web Service to perform a function at run-time.

Computer network

A peer-to-peer network operating in accordance with a service-oriented architecture is disclosed. The peers in the network request services from one another and each keeps a record of the quality of service they receive from the other peers. The peers share quality of service information with one another in order to take advantage of the improvement in the overall efficiency of the use of resources in the network offered by such information sharing. However, the invention provides a further improvement in that peers do not report the quality of service offered by the peers they have received the best quality of service from. This is found to increase the overall level of service still further since it prevents the peers converging on a favorite service provider and thereby overloading it. The invention finds particular application in distributed applications which dynamically select a Web Service to perform a function at run-time.

Growing community of inventors

Frydek-Mistek, Czechia

Michal Jakob