 |
Seminar on Internetworking
Introduction on the topics
Routing Beyond Layer 4
Background
For years Web Services have been subject to a lot of hype, and often not due to technically valid reasons, unfortunately. However, behind the hype, Web Services are commonly coupled with "Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) - which do have some interesting features.
In Web Services SOA, larger applications are divided into smaller distributed modules/services integrated by means of SOAP. Now, applications consisting of these smaller distributed services form a "service network". As the interconnections inside the application(s) are open, due to the openness of SOAP itself, one can enable more intelligent routing architecture than traditionally - after all the SOAP messages could be even fully understood by network elements routing them. This vision of distributed services has been often called "Application Layer Internetworking".
Topic proposal:
As SOAP is still a rather fast moving target, it would be interesting to know the current state of the art in "application layer internetworking" of Web Services. In terms of difficulty, this is "intermediate" level - as the subject may require quite a lot digging. If needed, the topic can be arranged to be more demanding by including comparison/analysis between application layer and layer 3/4 routing.
I would recommend the student to have a background of SOAP and/or other middleware protocols.
Material to start with:
This page is maintained by Internetworking teaching staff, E-mail: iwork@tml.hut.fi.The page has been last updated on Jan 20th, 2004
URL: http://www.tml.hut.fi/Studies/T-110.551/2004/beyond4.html