A Service Oriented Architecture for Deploying and Managing Network Services

New generation network services must be deployed and managed according to the specific customer requirements. In this context, service providers must devise a way to design network services with near zero time-to-market and high degrees of customization and evolution. Customization is necessary to fit the service according to the customer’s requirements, while evolution is necessary to adapt the service as soon as these requirements change. In addition, customers are demanding the ability to manage the service in order to keep the usage, configuration, and evolution under their control. This paper presents an approach based on service oriented architecture (SOA) for developing network services able to fulfill the requirements of rapid deployment, customization, and customer-side manageability. The approach considers the network service as a set of interacting elements implemented as Web Services. The service logic is expressed in terms of Web Services orchestration. A prototype for the management of connections in optical networks is presented as a case study.