Realization of service-orientation paradigm in network architectures

The implementation of communication protocols in the current Internet architecture is tightly-coupled which hinders the evolution of the Internet. This article describes how the principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be employed to develop a flexible network architecture. The prototype of the concept has been developed and demonstrated in the EuroView 2012 workshop. We showed that the SOA paradigm can be applied to networks by utilizing the concepts of self-contained building blocks, dynamic protocol graphs (PGs) and functional composition (FC) methods. We demonstrated that both short-term flexibility (i.e., networks are adapted based on application requirements) and long-term flexibility (i.e., networks can be evolved) can be achieved by using the architecture.