QoS issues in Web services

Quality of service (QoS) is a combination of several qualities or properties of a service, such as: availability is the percentage of time that a service is operating; security properties include the existence and type of authentication mechanisms the service offers, confidentiality and data integrity of messages exchanged, nonrepudiation of requests or messages, and resilience to denial-of-service attacks; response time is the time a service takes to respond to various types of requests; Response time is a function of load intensity, which can be measured in terms of arrival rates (such as requests per second) or number of concurrent requests. QoS takes into account not only the average response time, but also the percentile of the response time; and throughput is the rate at which a service can process requests. QoS measures can include the maximum throughput or a function that describes how throughput varies with load intensity. The QoS measure is observed by Web services users. These users are not human beings but programs that send requests for services to Web service providers. QoS issues in Web services have to be evaluated from the perspective of the providers of Web services and from the perspective of the users of these services.