Service Orientation Paradigm in Future Network Architectures

The Internet can not keep up with changing application requirements and new network technologies as its network architecture makes it hard to introduce new functionality because existing functionalities in the Architecture are inherently tightly coupled. This article describes how the principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can help to develop more flexible network architecture. We argue that the SOA paradigm can be applied to networks by utilizing the concepts of self-contained building blocks, dynamic protocol graphs and selection and composition methods. In order to make use of flexible networks, applications must be decoupled from the protocols they use. We give a brief overview, of how some of these concepts are already implemented, by presenting few approaches. Finally we describe some challenges of service oriented network architecture.