Advances in Next Generation Services and Service Architectures presents state-of-the-art results in services and service architectures, identifies challenges including business models, technology issues, service management, and security, and describes important trends and directions. The book is intended to provide readers with a comprehensive reference for the most current developments in the field. It offers broad coverage of important topics with eighteen chapters covering both technology and applications written by international experts. The chapters are organized into the following four parts:- * Part 1: Emerging Services and Service Architectures - This part provides eight chapters which survey many of the important emerging categories of services, and provides details about architectures, service models, and sample applications. * Part 2: IPTV and Video Services - Video content delivery to a variety of endpoints with varying capacities and network connectivity is a fundamental service. In this part, four chapters address enabling technologies including semantic support, context-awareness, QoE optimization, and support for mobile devices. * Part 3: Context Awareness - User sensitive application delivery has long been viewed as an important capability to increase the value of services to users. Context awareness focuses on representing and using the immediate situation and surroundings of the user in the delivery of the service. In this part, four chapters cover recent progress in context awareness and illustrate its use in next generation networks and IPTV. * Part 4: Security - New types of services and service architectures require new security techniques. This part contains two chapters, one on security challenges and the other on the user of reputation in service management. Advances in Next Generation Services and Service Architectures is complemented by a separate volume, Future Internet Services and Service Architectures, which covers future Internet architectures, peer-to-peer service models, event based processing, and VANETs. Keywords Services, Service Architectures, IPTV, context awareness, smart grids, web 2.0, IMS, security, next-generation networks.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) uses services as the baseline for developing new architectures and applications, as networks are built specifically to satisfy service requirements. Most services are currently handled over different networks, but newer services will soon require cross-network support. Architecting the Telecommunication Evolution: Toward Converged Network Services outlines the challenges of providing crossover services and the new architectures and protocols that will enable convergence between circuit- and packet-switched networks. Taking a standards-based approach to converged services, this book lays a foundation for SOA in telecommunications. The authors begin by outlining the development of Internet telephony, focusing on how to use the respective benefits of the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet to create and implement more value-added services. These two eminent specialists first examine services that originate in the Internet and take advantage of PSTN services, and then explore how discrete events on the PSTN can be used as an impetus to creating services on the Internet. They conclude with a discussion on how this convergence creates smart spaces in the telecoms domain. Including eight valuable appendices that will aid in the implementation of converged services, Architecting the Telecommunication Evolution is the first book of its kind to offer a survey as well as a practical roadmap to integrating modern networks to achieve better performance and new functionality.