A Survey of SOA Technologies in NGN Network Architectures

The SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm has been driving the definition of important technologies in the telecommunication field for the last decade, as it fosters the deployment of reusable components to support efficient seamless services across different networks. Most of these technologies have focused on the definition of high-level network service interfaces and functionalities, such as Parlay-X and IMS, guaranteeing the success of the SOA model in the telco market after that of web applications. Some works proposing the adoption of this model in the lower network layers have also been proposed, but they have not proved to have the same impact yet. This paper intends to provide the reader with a survey of the works that have been proposed in this field by following the NGN (Next Generation Network) functional architecture as defined by the ITU-T. Specifically, we focus on the service and transport strata of the NGN model and, within each of these, we highlight the main logic functions that have been the subject of investigation according to a service-oriented approach. From the literature review, it can be seen that most of the works fall in service stratum, mostly because of the need for an easy integration of distributed service components at this layer. Only a few papers focus on the transport functionalities, where the benefits of applying the SOA paradigm still need to be investigated.