Towards a telecommunication service oriented architecture

Web services are often used for providing and composing business services, but this approach does not scale easily for telecommunications services and for value-added ones, composing services offered by information technology (IT) providers with telecom operators' ones. The typical request-response interaction style is the main bottleneck when applying Web services protocols to the telecom domain, which requires higher performances and needs efficient ways to handle notifications of events produced by network resources in the telecom infrastructure. This paper evaluates benefits and drawbacks of Web service applications within a telecom domain, analyzing current standardization proposals for asynchronous Web services, which are a necessary evolution toward a fully interoperable telecom service-oriented architecture (SOA).