Unified telecom and web services composition

Abstract

In the domain of web applications, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) promotes the composition of coarse-grained web services to build more complex web applications using standards such as WS-BPEL. This paradigm encourages software modularity and re-use, language and platform independence, distributedness, and integration across enterprise boundaries. At the same time, in the domain of telecommunications, standards such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture and the SIP Servlet API enable the composition of individual SIP applications into complete services, reaping similar benefits. There are also ongoing efforts to integrate the two domains. The ultimate goal is to enable service providers to easily re-use existing services to build new converged web and telephony services that offer the users a rich and seamless experience. However, there are a number of problems associated with composing modular telecom and web services. In this paper we clearly define these problems and explain how approaches to telecom service composition and web services composition are fundamentally different. By way of pointing towards solutions we critically examine a number of existing partial solutions to these problems and discuss how and why they fall short of providing a complete solution. Finally we discuss some future directions that research can take in order to completely solve these problems.