Enhancing ESB Based Execution Platform to Support Flexible Communication Web Services over Heterogeneous Networks

The merging of telecommunication and Internet domains is a real challenge for supporting the evolution towards the next generation of Web services. Enterprise service bus (ESB) has been regarded as a promising way to support dynamic and agile service integration in distributed heterogeneous environments. As communication services have strong real-time requirements and are based on asynchronous interactions, generic ESB based service integration is no longer suitable. This paper proposes an enhanced ESB based execution platform in which a low-latency service engine has been seamlessly integrated to support flexible communication Web services over heterogeneous networks. The design and implementation of the enhancements, a novel communication Web services based multimedia conference system, the prototype, and some preliminary performance measurements are presented. The performance results are encouraging.