Comparative Evaluation of Converged Service-Oriented Architectures

In this paper we evaluate and compare five commercial off-the-shelf platforms for building converged service-oriented architectures in an ambient computing environment. To this end, we have identified several categories of requirements that support the always-connected digital lifestyle of the mobile user. Key requirements are providing convergence - joining the worlds of Web services and telecom services - and offering context awareness in order to tailor services better to the user's environment, preferences and needs. Our evaluation shows that currently none of the investigated architectures completely fulfills the two aforementioned requirements in order to deploy a variety of future converged mobile and context-aware services. However, the resulting comparison can be used as a practical guideline for decision-makers to select a platform to build a service-oriented architecture adjusted to the specific requirements within their application domain.