Towards a Service Composition Language for Heterogeneous Service Environments Jörg Niemöller, Konstantinos Vandikas, Roman Levenshteyn Ericsson Corporate Research Software & Services Herzogenrath, Germany {joerg.niemoeller, konstantinos.vandikas, roman.levenshteyhn}@ericsson.com Daniel Schleicher, Frank Leymann University of Stuttgart Institute of Architecture of Application Systems Stuttgart, Germany {daniel.schleicher, frank.leymann}@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract—In this paper we provide an outline and characteristics of a language that allows the design of compositions within a heterogeneous service landscape. Heterogeneous refers to services from various industries and application domains like for example telecommunication, enterprise, web 2.0 and general IT. The language shall enable to use services from all these domains within a single service composition. We propose general requirements for this new language and we also offer an analysis of existing languages and their specific application domains. Finally, we discuss and propose extensions to an already existing standardized workflow language that enables heterogeneous compositions. Keywords- Service Composition, BPEL, BPMN, SIP, IMS I. INTRODUCTION The service landscape today consists of many different technologies used to implement services. We can observe the result of a historical development process aiming to find solutions for concrete technical problems within multiple business domains. As an example, the business cases and requirements encountered in the traditional telecommunication industry are different than those found in the enterprise industries or the public internet and have resulted into different services offered to their corresponding end users. These were separate industries and each of them produced a portfolio of service technologies optimized for domain specific technical challenges. As a result we observe today an overall service ecosystem which is to a great extent heterogeneous. Convergence between the traditionally separated IT/internet, enterprise and telecommunication industries is ongoing and gains significant momentum from current and future market demands. The internet of things, the expectation of more than 50 billion connected devices in a few years and the ever-increasing popularity of smart-phones are only a few examples. They mark an inflationary growth of assets with increased and at the same time highly diverse communication demands. In order to accommodate this growth, networks will not only connect devices to each other, but they will also provide a dynamic service infrastructure as backend. The future service landscape, as outlined here, requires diversification and individually customized services. The premise of service composition becomes therefore an essential and central technique for service creation and integration in such future service networks. In recent years, technologies which allow orchestrating services into applications based on modeling of business processes and automatically executed workflows, have gained broad acceptance. Architectural concepts like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are well established. Technologies such as SOAP/Web Services and the Web-Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) [3] have emerged to build a platform for a SOA. They are used in many application scenarios. In parallel, these topics have been meticulously researched regarding their capabilities and also their limitations. Ericsson has done extensive research in recent years targeting flexible service environments that apply principles of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to telecommunication networks and at the same time integrate telecommunication services with other service worlds. The references [1], [6] and [7] provide an overview of this composition technology. One result of this research was the finding that existing and popular languages such as BPEL do not fully cover requirements that exist in domains like telecommunication. Compositions defined in BPEL are based on workflow models where the execution order of the comprised activities is predefined at design-time. Furthermore the service usage follows a simple request-response paradigm based on stateless Web Services. On the other hand many practical use-cases that include telecommunication services are highly event driven and frequently require service implementations that are aware of the state of related user sessions and protocols. These experiences motivated a strong demand for a new language that is able to efficiently specify compositions in heterogeneous service environments and that is still relatively easy to understand and use. This paper discusses which properties a language for specifying this type of service compositions should have. The resulting language shall be designed in a way that results in a significant progress to the convergence of industries and technological domains. 2011 15th International Conference on Intelligence in Next Generation Networks 978-1-61284-321-6/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 121