Enhancing enterprise service bus capability for load balancing

ESB is a core middleware technology which can support the integration of services according to the Service Oriented Architecture. A major responsibility of ESB is to route messages to heterogeneous services. However, conventional ESBs support only static routing, i.e. the service to which a message is sent must be fixed a priori. Thus, even if there are many services that can satisfy the same request, the request is always sent to the same service without considering the service status, e.g., load, at that time. This situation may lead to a low throughput performance on the service side and low satisfaction on the consumer side. This paper aims to enhance the ESB capability by supporting load balancing. Our approach focuses on balancing among a group of different services with the same function. We introduce the concept of service type and show the results of an experiment.