Enhanced Next-Generation Service Overlay Networks architecture

The Web Services composition paradigm has been widely used in Information Technology (IT) and Internet environments to create Web applications that both flexible and rapidly deployable. Web Services are a key way to realize Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). In Telecom, on the other hand, the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture enables valued-added services composition for IP-based networks. Several ongoing efforts - referred to as “SOA for telecom” (SOA-TEL) - are attempting to merge SOA with telecom. The objective of these attempts is to enable Telecom operators and service providers to re-use existing service building blocks while building valued-added converged Web and telephony services. These services offer seamless experiences across various networks and, therefore, richer experiences, but are more complex than typical Web Services (e.g., transaction-based). The IEEE Next-Generation Service Overlay Networks (NGSON) working group is focusing on this integration and an architecture has been proposed. In addition, NGSON specifies context-aware, dynamically adaptive, and self-organizing networking capabilities. There are, however, a number of shortcomings in the NGSON architecture. This paper identifies these shortcomings and describes a possible solution. Finally, we discuss an illustrative use case scenario to help bring clarity to our proposed “enhanced” NSGON architecture.