Comparative Evaluation of Converged Service-Oriented Architectures

In this paper we evaluate and compare five commercial off-the-shelf platforms for building converged service-oriented architectures in an ambient computing environment. To this end, we have identified several categories of requirements that support the always-connected digital lifestyle of the mobile user. Key requirements are providing convergence - joining the worlds of Web services and telecom services - and offering context awareness in order to tailor services better to the user´s environment, preferences and needs. Our evaluation shows that currently none of the investigated architectures completely fulfills the two aforementioned requirements in order to deploy a variety of future converged mobile and context-aware services. However, the resulting comparison can be used as a practical guideline for decision-makers to select a platform to build a service-oriented architecture adjusted to the specific requirements within their application domain.