Binary data transfer performance over high-latency networks using web service attachments

Abstract

One of the objectives of e-Research is to help scientists to accomplish their research, including scientific experiments, more effectively and efficiently. Web services provide communication between different platforms by using standardized SOAP message protocols. Hence, it is often productive to implement web service interfaces for the integration of experimental infrastructure into a collaborative e-Science framework. In this context, transfer and management of experimental data is an important problem. SOAP messaging is primarily oriented towards XML character data, with binary data transmitted with, for example, a base64 character encoding. However, as scientific experiments often generate binary data, transferring binary information by applying an encoding algorithm can slow down the performance of the system. The notion of web service attachment, has been introduced to solve this problem. In this paper, we illustrate how we use web services with attachments to improve binary data transfer performance. We present results of tests, using Axis2 and XFire APIs, conducted over a campus IAN, an inter-city WAN, and an intercontinental WAN. We also make some comparison with the use of GridFTP.