A Survey of SOA Technologies in NGN Network Architectures

Abstract

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.

A Service-Oriented Approach for Dynamic Chaining of Virtual Network Functions over Multi-Provider Software-Defined Networks

“…SOA principles have been adopted in the past for the rapid and flexible development and management of value-added telecom services. However, a literature review on SOA models for Next Generation Networks [9] shows that, while many works focused on the integration of distributed service components at the service stratum, the benefits of applying the SOA paradigm to the transport functionalities have been scarcely investigated. Furthermore, recent works on network and service virtualization [10] show that the opportunity to adopt the SOA approach in telecom cloud environments remains quite unexplored.…”

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“…On the other hand, some standards, such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) [62], Parlay X [101], and OneAPI [61], aim to carry out composition of individual Telecom services into new more complex services, leveraging the reuse and standardization of subjacent technologies [19]. In general terms: (i ) IMS can be seen as an architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia services by permitting the integration of services based among others on SOAP, REST, and SIP, (ii ) Parlay X introduces the concept of Telco Web services to allow the creation of composite services; and (iii ) ONEAPI exposes network facilites as services, aiming to facilitate the combination of these facilities with services from the Web domain.…”

“…Parlay X [101] is an important alternative to provide convergent services in NGN-based networks, permitting the use of Web services in the Telecom domain. Parlay X [60] [135] is an standard that comprises a set of services (from the Web and Telecom domains) offered like APIs that facilitate the composition of more complex functionalities to be provided in Telecom networks.…”

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“…Later OMA released the Next Generation Service Interfaces (NGSIs), which expand services for seamless integration of fixed and mobile networks. NGSI focuses on new requirements and API extensions for server-to-server based third party services [16]. The final version was approved and released in May 2012 [17].…”