Improving data transfer performance of web service workflows in the cloud environment

Web service data forwarding (WSDF) is a framework for centralised web service workflow, in which the intermediate result from a previous service is treated as a resource of the composite service and can be directly used by its subsequent service, without sending it back to the centralised control centre. To improve the data transfer performance of web service workflows in the cloud environment, we carried out a test of the WSDF framework in the ScienceCloud, provided by the Nimbus cloud infrastructure. The experiment showed that, in the cloud environment, the WSDF framework has significant performance advantage over normal web service framework for workflows with large data transfer and the improvement of performance agrees with the expected theoretical value.