Enterprises may use a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to provide a streamlined interface to their business processes. To scale up the system, each tier in a composite service usually deploys multiple servers for load distribution and fault tolerance. Such load distribution across multiple servers within the same tier can be viewed as horizontal load distribution. One limitation of this approach is that load cannot be further distributed when all servers in the same tier are fully loaded. In complex multi-tiered systems, a single business process may actually be implemented by multiple different computation pathways among the tiers, each with different components, in order to provide resiliency and scalability. Such SOA-based enterprise computing with multiple implementation options gives opportunities for vertical load distribution across tiers. In this paper, we propose a request-routing framework for SOA-based enterprise computing that takes into consideration both horizontal and vertical load distribution. Through experimentation we show that our algorithm and methodology scale well up to a large system configuration comprising up to 1000 workflow requests to a complex composite service with multiple implementations. We also show that a combination of both horizontal and vertical load distributions gives the maximum flexibility to improve performance and fault tolerance.
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