Dynamic composition of services for end-to-end information transport

An increasing number of communication technologies in access and core segments of the network belonging to different providers and subject to different network design criteria are making networks complex and difficult to manage. In such networks it is also more difficult to guarantee requested levels of quality of service. Service oriented design can be the answer to problems facing the providers of services for information transport. In this article we propose an end-to-end service composition for information transport based on principles from service oriented architecture (i.e., dynamically composing transport services with characteristics matching the requirements of a given application). SOA principles are similar to those behind the division of labor, and therefore should give providers incentive to adopt them to make better use of resources and increase revenue. As we show, some SOA concepts are similar to concepts in the open systems interconnection reference model, with the key advantages of dynamism and flexibility. We discuss service oriented networks based on transport service composition across access and core segments, and describe access network selection for online gaming. In particular, we show how semantic technologies can be used for layer 2 queries and discuss the advantages of using knowledge bases over traditional approaches.