Benchmark of middleware protocols for application and service interaction

A variety of protocols exist, which may be considered as messaging middleware for facilitating application and service interactions in distributed and technologically heterogeneous environments. Standardized candidates include text-based Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) of Web Services (WS) and Instant Messaging Extensions of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). In addition, binary-based approaches such as Generic Communications Middleware (GCM) and compression of XML have been proposed. The contribution of this paper is a benchmark and evaluation of SOAP, SIP and GCM as messaging middleware for application and service interaction. In particular protocol overhead, Round-Trip-Time (RTT) and processing latency have been focused on in experiments performed in a Java-based test-bed. The results indicate the optimized performance of the binary approaches, when compared to textbased protocols. More importantly the detailed performance comparison indicates factors contributing to RTT and processing latency, which should be helpful when making technology selections between the protocol candidates. In addition applicability of the protocols is discussed.