Optimal Admission Control for a QoS-Aware Service-Oriented System

In the service computing paradigm, a service broker can build new applications by composing network-accessible services offered by loosely coupled independent providers. In this paper, we address the admission control problem for a a service broker which offers to prospective users a composite service with a range of different Quality of Service (QoS) classes. We formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem with the goal of maximizing the broker revenue while guaranteeing non-functional QoS requirements to its already admitted users. To assess the effectiveness of the MDP-based admission control, we present experimental results where we compare the optimal decisions obtained by the analytical solution of the MDP with other policies.