On the Emergence of an Application-Oriented Network Architecture

There is much debate today on what should be the architecture of the next generation of networks. In this paper, we address this question from the perspective of applications. We examine current and emerging applications to identify the factors that lead to a successful deployment. In addition to new computing models, we also examine trends in the mainstream information technology and telecom service provider industry, namely, Service Oriented Architecture and IP Multimedia Subsystem. We identify requirements of, and then present some views on what constitutes the future application-oriented networks architecture, and finally we propose a new model for future application-oriented networks and we discuss the research challenges.