Communication models for services

Communication is an essential aspect of services. Services do not only realize simple request-response scenarios, but increasingly implement complex and stateful communication protocols. Such a protocol specifies the order in which messages are sent and received by a service and is an essential part of a service description. Services are usually not executed in isolation, but as a collaboration which is composed of several services. The behavior of such a collaboration is not only determined by the communication protocol of each participating service, but also by the way messages are exchanged. A communication model specifies the properties of the message channels between the services and defines the way how messages are sent and received. This paper studies and classifies several dimensions of communication models and describes their impact to the behavior of service compositions.