Transport Stratum Services in NGN: A SOA-Oriented Design

The transport stratum in the ITU-T Next Generation Networks (NGN) is expected to provide end-to-end connectivity according to the service requirements, the terminal capability and status of the network resource availability. Whereas mature technologies and protocols, such as DiffServ and MPLS, are available to satisfy these requirements, some issues are still open concerning the capability to provide these services in a dynamic and flexible way. In particular, interoperable and open interfaces are missing at the transport stratum, so that the dynamic activation of distributed application layer services is synchronized with dynamic activation, configuration and monitoring of transport services. This is the challenge addressed in this paper, whose objective is the definition of the NGN Transport Stratum functionalities according to the SOA paradigm and the implementation of the relevant services interfaces to analyze the potentialities of this approach. With the intention to follow the evolutionary approach towards the transition into the NGN networks from the current Internet, this study has been conducted by taking into account the efforts that have been already devoted in the last decade with regard to the definition of the technologies and protocols to build multiservice, QoS-aware and TE-oriented networks solutions. Preliminary experimental results provide some insight on the potentialities of the proposed strategy.