Quality of Service in Business-to-Business E-Commerce Applications

Ulrich Fiedler and Bernhard Plattner

Gustavo Alonso

Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory

ETH Zrich, Gloriastr. 35, CH-8092 Zrich,
Switzerland
{fiedler, plattner}@tik.ee.ethz.ch

Institute for Information Systems

ETH Zrich, Clausiusstr. 50, CH-8092 Zrich,
Switzerland
alonso@inf.ethz.ch

Abstract
Electronic commerce has attracted a great deal of
attention recently. Among the different types of electronic
commerce, business-to-business is the one most widespread in terms of turnover. An important aspect in business-to-business e-commerce scenarios is how to meet
response time and throughput requirements of applications in spite of execution taking place across corporate
boundaries and, in the future, via the Internet instead of
using leased lines. Given the unpredictable variations of
available bandwidth in todays Internet, providing Application Quality of Service guarantees for these requirements is a complex task. Due to the current trend to run
multimedia applications over the Internet, we assume that
the future Internet will not only support best effort service
but also guaranteed service, e.g., via network resource
reservation. This allows to take advantage of this service
also for e-commerce applications. The problem remains
non-trivial due to the wide variations among application
scenarios. As a first step towards implementing a generic
solution, this paper proposes a scheme which enables virtual business processes to meet response times and
throughput requirements through network resource reservation. The paper describes the application scenarios we
have in mind, the system where these ideas are being
implemented (WISE), and the mechanisms involved in providing Quality of Service guarantees at the application
level.

Introduction

Business-to-business electronic commerce is commonly practiced following one of two approaches. The
first one reflects traditional practices among large companies which handle purchases from a pre-determined set of
suppliers in an electronic form. Such systems are usually
implemented based on leased lines, mainframes, and legacy application code. As a result, the cost of deploying
these systems limits their applicability to large companies

with well-established commercial ties. The second

approach is based on the notion of enterprise networks,
where different companies pool their services to offer
more complex, value-added products. This approach is
more challenging given its dynamic nature and the greater
degree of cooperation required from all parties involved.
In addition it is also the most promising approach for
small and medium enterprises and the natural model for
the Internet. This approach, together with the notion of
virtual business processes, virtual enterprises, and trading
communities, can be modeled as cross organizational
workflows [1,3].
We define Application Quality of Service as performance guarantees in terms of response time (e.g., how
long must a customer wait until the transaction is completed) and throughput of the applications (e.g., how many
transactions can be executed per second). In a distributed
environment, this Application Quality of Service is built
atop of Network Quality of Service. In the first approach,
leased lines have inherent guarantees for Quality of Service. For the second approach, we claim that Quality of
Service support in todays Internet is inadequate. The difficulty lies in the Internets service model which is solely
best effort. However, this service model can be enhanced
to support further service classes like guaranteed service
[11]. Such enhancements are proposed in the Integrated
Services model [4,5] and could also be provided through
the Differentiated Services model [6] when combined with
admission control. In the future, in order to support multimedia applications, it is likely that a combination of Integrated Services at the access level and Differentiated
Services on the backbone will be deployed in the Internet
for scalability reasons. We can take advantage of these
new service classes to build Application Quality of Service which in turn will open up new possibilities for business-to-business electronic commerce.
Following these ideas, this paper discusses how to
implement Application Quality of Service guarantees by
intelligently employing network service guarantees. The
main challenge we face is the difference in granularity of

service guarantees at which many business processes and

the network operate. For instance, many business processes involve relatively small amounts of data (e.g., a few
Kilobytes) preventing them from using costly resource
reservation on a per-process basis. In addition, there is a
clear trade-off between the requirements of each process
and the overhead incurred when signaling for resource reservation. One possible solution is to classify the processes
according to their Application Quality of Service requirements and to multiplex them over previously opened connections. To do so we need to be able to estimate the
resource requirements of several concurrent processes.
This, in turn, can be done by a prediction process, which
may base on a combination of analysis of the structure of
the scheduled processes, execution statistics on a time-ofday and time-of-week basis plus early awareness of events
like congestions on particular connections. In this paper,
we propose a scheme to categorize processes and predict
the need in network resources. To conceptually verify the
applicability of our ideas we look at typical scenarios
where this could be deployed with a focus on the stock
market. Finally we discuss first simulation results of networks in these scenarios to evaluate the contribution of
network resource reservations to Application Quality of
Service.

2
2.1

WISE Infrastructure
Virtual Enterprises

We define a virtual business process as a business process whose definition and enactment cannot be directly
tied to a single organizational entity (be it a department or
a company). From here, we define virtual enterprises as
those whose business processes are virtual business processes. In this paper we refer to the set of companies participating in a virtual business process as a trading
community. Each member of the trading community provides a number of services to be used as building blocks
for the virtual process. Based on these services, the virtual
enterprise can be created by defining a virtual process in
which each individual activity corresponds to one of the
services provided by the participants. The virtual business
process can be seen as a distributed program running on
some form of middleware linking together the resources of
the trading community [9]. The approach to define a trading community based on the companies potentially
involved and not on virtual business processes is intentionally chosen since this paper addresses how to implement
Application Quality of Service for virtual business processes on top of network service guarantees for the connections between the companies involved.

2.2

WISE

The notions of trading community, virtual enterprise

and virtual business process as explained above have been
implemented as part of the WISE system (Workflow based
Internet Services) [3]. We have made a substantial effort to
make WISE a complete solution, that is, a system incorporating all the necessary functionality to be used in practice
and this includes Quality of Service guarantees.

3
3.1

QoS for E-Commerce Processes

Networks

In corporate applications it is taken for granted that

certain performance guarantees can be provided by the
application in terms of response time and throughput without further network support due to the abounding amount
of bandwidth available in a LAN. In virtual enterprises, it
is difficult to provide such guarantees since currently there
is no control over available bandwidth in the Internet.
In the global Internet, which only supports best effort
service, the network has two states, quiescent and busy
[7]. These two states correlate with business hours. In its
busy state packet loss rate due to congestions on particular
connections go up to 6% inside Europe and up to 17%
over the Atlantic. Successive packet losses are grouped
into outages1. Outage duration has infinite variance. This
infinite variance, caused by a heavy tail in the outage duration distribution, makes it impossible to give appropriate
statistical guarantees on the arrival of packets. It is commonly believed that the heavy tail and self similar traffic
patterns come from the wide variations of session duration (subseconds to years). Measurements [7] show that up
to 17% of the outages last more that 2 seconds and 2%
even longer than a minute. In some applications this is not
a crucial problem. However, in many application areas like
banking, trading, bidding, or medical, to mention a few, it
is not realistic to build systems without Application Quality of Service guarantees. To enable these guarantees
within WISE we build on network support like Integrated
Services at the access level [5].
We have to ensure that problems caused by the network are not shifted from congestion duration distributions with infinite variance in best effort mode to resource
reservation blocking behavior with similar consequences
for the applications. Therefore we assume that pricing
schemes are such that resource reservation is expensive
enough that far the most traffic will still be transferred in
best effort mode. This will result in a huge space for possible reservations. Further we expect that resource reserva-

1. Terminology as in [7]

tion duration will be limited especially at the lower end .

This prevents from self similar characteristics of traffic
patterns which cause a heavy tail in blocking probability
distributions which in turn makes it impossible to give statistical guarantees on the quality of network service.
These assumptions show these performance guarantees cannot be provided at an arbitrary cost. There needs to
be a clear and reasonable relation between the overall cost
and the guarantees provided. In fact, one of the biggest
problems in todays electronic commerce is that this relation is neither reasonable nor clear. If one opts for leased
lines, the cost is certainly very high and not necessarily
related to the actual needs. A resource reservation
approach on the other hand enables the ISP to reuse temporarily unused or partially unused reservations for other
best effort traffic. We assume that for aggregated traffic
there is a reasonable amount of temporarily unused or
partially used reservations e.g. due to silent sound suppression in IP-telephony or varying transaction throughput
making cost a valid argument for an approach based on
resource reservations.

3.2

Application QoS

In practice, there is a wide difference in requirements

of different applications. Some virtual business processes,
e.g. stock trading, may have a very high volume (thousands of them executed per minute) but a very small
demand on a per process basis (a few Kilobytes). Others,
e.g. medical information systems, may occur relatively
infrequently (a few per day) but each one of them may
involve substantial amounts of multimedia data (several
Megabytes). In other cases, response time may be critical:
stock trading has an almost subsecond response time
requirement, while supply management involves response
times of hours or even days. When implementing a system
like WISE which is a generic platform for virtual business
processes, mechanisms are needed to support a wide variety of processes with different requirements for Application Quality of Service guarantees.
The goal is to provide a scheme to allow WISE users
to flexibly specify their requirements at process level in
terms of processes and activities: processes per second,
per day, volume between activities, between nodes, etc.,
and to have the system taking care of the necessary management of resources to enforce these guarantees at a trading community level for servers and network. To do so
WISE multiplexes the traffic of all processes related to
the trading community over previously opened connections and manages associated resource reservations. The
connection to any member in the trading community is
opened as soon as a process involving this member is
scheduled. If required by the process specification, reser-

vations are established and managed on this connection to

enable guaranteed service. To establish the reservation we
assume that the Internet supports guaranteed Quality of
Services as specified in RFC 2212 [11] and signaling protocols as RSVP[12].
To manage resource reservations in WISE we include a
special process to predict the future load and adjust the
available resources. This prediction process analyses the
history space for time-of-day and time-of- week patterns
plus the structure of scheduled processes and the network
state to estimate the servers load and network reservations utilization.
History Space Analyzer
Process structure Analyzer
Awareness Events Processor

Table 1: Components of Prediction Process

For this purpose, WISE has a history space where it
stores all the information associated with already executed
or running processes. Future load in the trading community is then derived by extrapolating averages, standard
deviation and maximum of the number of processes
scheduled. To adjust network resources this load plus
additional history space information like the number of
deadlines missed or almost missed, network congestions
encountered are taken into account.
Similarly, WISE takes advantage of the process
approach by analyzing the structure of processes.If the
prediction process finds any activity within a process
potentially consuming a large amount of network
resources like a video conference WISE takes it into
account if the needs of this process are not already covered by the history space analysis.
In addition, WISE monitors not only the current state
of process execution but also the ongoing traffic on corresponding network connections. This is done via an awareness model [2] based on recording and logging network
characteristics like round-trip-time and packet-loss-rate
for traffic in best effort mode and resource utilization in
guaranteed mode at both ends of each connection. When
the monitoring system detects that a given measurement
goes beyond a prespecified threshold, an awareness event
is send to all members of the trading community which in
turn will readjust their resource reservations. This is done
reliably and in guaranteed mode where ever possible and
is also used to create early warnings and to support comprehensive load balancing.

Scenario

Time Lapse

Peak Rate

Data Volume

Stock Exchange

1 sec

~128 KBit/s

~100 Byte

Internet Auctions

10 sec

~16 KBit/s

~100 Byte

Travel agency (Booking)

10 sec

~24 KBit/s

~300/2000 Byte

Stock Keeping

1 hour

~4 KBit/s

~10 KByte

Insurance claim processing

1 day

~1 KBit/s

~ 1 MByte

Table 2: Performance QoS Requirements for Workflows with Different Time Lapse (Estimation)

3.3

Process Categories

Doing all this has an obvious cost. It would not be reasonable to expect that all possible users of WISE will be
willing to face the cost or complexity of dealing with quality guarantees. Thus, we have introduced a scheme with
additional flexibility in the system so as to let the user
decide when quality guarantees are necessary and when
they are not.
WISE distinguishes between three process categories:
critical, important, and normal. For each one of them a different guarantees at different costs are provided.
Process
Category

Delay
Guarantee

Throughput
Guarantee

Critical

Yes

Yes

Important

only for a
Single Process

No - offers only
Regulation
Mechanisms

Best Effort

No

No

Table 3: Process Categories

For a critical process, WISE can guarantee target figures for both response time (how long will it take to execute a process) and throughput (how many process will be
executed per unit of time). In practice, these guarantees
mean that the execution of processes will not be delayed
beyond a certain deadline and the system will be able to
accept up to certain number of concurrent processes. This
is accomplished by reserving bandwidth among all partners involved so that the network cannot be congested and
cause delay in the process execution and by initializing a
sufficient number of servers and related resources at each
participating node so as to make sure that all partners can
cope with the expected load. It is in these cases, critical
processes, where predictions need to be made about future
loads, assumptions dynamically readjusted as systems fail
and resume operation, networks fail and resume operation,
etc.

For important processes, WISE provides statistical

guarantees regarding the delay in the execution of a process but no guarantees on throughput. The techniques
involved in maintaining such guarantees are increasing the
execution priority, attending to load balancing parameters,
and providing early warnings if necessary. While these
guarantees are not as strong as for critical processes, they
are still expected to bound the time a process will be
delayed with a given probability (e.g. 98%).
Finally, normal processes are executed in best effort
mode, that is, without any guarantees regarding possible
delays or throughput. Nevertheless, WISE can also throw
warnings when normal processes are going to run into
troubles: for instance, by taking longer to execute than a
given deadline. This warnings are not a guarantee but may
alert users of potential problems before they affect the system in any serious manner.

3.4

Implementation Scenarios

Table 2 gives an overview of implementation scenarios

investigated to conceptually validate the concept to guarantee Application Quality of Service in e-commerce on a
per process level on top of Network Quality of Service
guarantees on a trading community level. These scenarios
were chosen because they share common requirements on
execution guarantees, exception handling, high availability, scalability, security and Application Quality of Service. In the first tree the time lapse of the deadlines
becomes so small that Application Quality of Service
might need Network Quality of Service support in an
Internet context.
Due to the lack of space we will focus on the stock
market scenario here and present a case study of SWX
(Swiss stock exchange).

3.5

A Case Study: Swiss Stock Exchange

Stock processing is an e-commerce scenario with centralized processing for distributed customers (see figure 1).
Different from other scenarios is the high throughput at
small data volume within a very short time lapse at the

presence of varying requirements in terms of response

time and fairness of different classes of customers, like
private clients, banks or small enterprises.
Exchange System

Access Point

Access Point

Member (69)
Trading System

Gateway

Traders (1094)
Decision Support

Figure 1: SWX Topology Overview

SWX processes up to 55 transactions per seconds,
some 100 Kilobyte each. Its 69 members, mostly banks,
are directly connected via leased lines with 128 KBit/sec
bandwidth. Its basic qualities are transparency, fairness,
liquidity, efficiency, security and high availability. Market
transparency means that 90% of the members must
receive a broadcast of processed orders within 1.5 seconds
response time. Fairness among the different members
means that the variance of the actual broadcast response
time has to be under 5%. Liquidity calls for an access of a
maximum number of customers. Efficiency calls for an
economical infrastructure that allows interopability. Security and high availability of 99.99% need no further explanation
However, there is no obligation to conclude trades at
the stock exchange, but the Swiss legislation obliges
trades which exceeds CHF 800000 to be reported to the
stock exchange within 30 minutes in order to ensure the
transparency. The two numbers 1.5 seconds response time
and 30 minutes to report trades show two extremes in the
range of time lapse for professional traders. For private
customers with less stringent requirements in terms of
response time the banks record and gather the orders at the
branches and use their internal network to send the orders
to one of SWXs gateways to be processed at the stock
market (Figure 2). Today every small branch of a bank,
every small or medium enterprise and many homes have
access to the Internet. So the natural approach would be to
directly connect everyone into the stock market. This
approach is already pursued by Eschwab, Etrade and others, but falls short of the ability to differentiate between
different services needed by professional traders and pri-

vate clients. However WISE offers the possibility to

employ different services at different costs to fulfill the
requirements of different users. E.g. a professional trader
could employ a sort of critical process with guaranteed
throughput and delay which is enhanced to support the 5%
variance in delay required for fairness reasons. In addition
the professional trader could employ important processes
to report trades made outside of SWX within a few minutes, since for these delay is guaranteed. On the other hand
a private customer will most of the time do fine with normal processes making use of the Internets best effort service. If linked to the trading community this customer has
the ability to switch to important or critical processes at a
higher price when dissatisfied with the performance of
normal processes.
Since WISE also especially supports interoperability,
outsourcing of parts of the business process such as risk
evaluation etc. is especially supported. WISE further supports all additional functionality required by a stock market and could therefore be deployed as a unique coherent
platform offering efficient and economic service for private and professional traders.

Discussion

For the first three scenarios of table 2, we began to

evaluate if application QoS requirements inevitably need
network support. This evaluation was done by simulating
abstractions of the different scenarios together with
abstractions of the corresponding network. This simulation allows to check if throughput and response time of the
workflows are still acceptable at the presence of cross traffic or not. Core of the simulations is ns-2, the UCB/LBNL/
VINT network simulator [8]. For simulation performance
reasons we had to work with aggregations on the one hand
and ticketed end-systems on the other hand to quantify the
network contribution to Application Quality of Service.
For evaluation we investigated the timing of specific workflows at the presence of cross traffic with varying characteristics.
First results suggest that in the stock market scenario
resource reservation is not necessary as long as the network is the banks Intranet and the cross traffic entirely
http or audio (IP-telephony). This is likely to be different
if the network is the global Internet. Theoretical work (e.g.
[10]) suggests that under realistic assumption on load distribution and bandwidth cost reservation is likely to be a
must.

Conclusions and Future Work

We conclude that the results of our simulation suggest

that no network resource reservations are necessary to

Trading System
Member Side

Member Side

Exchange System
Market Side

Receipt

Private Agent /
Client Broker

SoftwareSystem TS

SoftwareSystem TS

Exchange
Order
enterOrder

ok

completeOrder

t = 3s - 30s

t = 1s

Additional Information:
Traders Info System
Phone
Risk Evaluation Tools

ok

Client ok
Client not ok

executeOrder ok
t = 1s

checkClient
t1 = 1s
t2 = m or h

Clerk

SoftwareSystem TS

matchingOrder ok
t = 2s

ES
END

finishOrder

t1 = 2s
t2 = 8h

BackOffice

SoftwareSystem TS

Figure 2: Stock Market Order Processing Workflow

realize the proposed process categories. In these categories, Application Quality of Service can be provided without resource reservation as long as the network is a
corporate network or an Intranet. Providing Quality of
Service may be different in the Internet, but this complex
environment remains difficult to be simulated [13].
We plan to further investigate in which scenarios and
in which networks resource reservation is in fact needed to
provide Application Quality of Service. Additionally, we
investigate the resource reservation blocking behavior. The
distribution of blocked reservation attempts and comparison of the amounts of resources required according to the
prediction process and the resources needed will enable us
to evaluate the applicability of the proposed mechanisms
in more depth.

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