With the emergence of new communication technologies, users want their communication experience to be richer and more integrated, with varied content accessed viag multi-function devices. They want more mobility and flexibility in using and choosing their communication services. As a result, requirements for new services are increasing. To meet these requirements, service providers must either implement new infrastructure or modify their current infrastructure. Current communication systems are typically based on a vertical layered approach where each service has its own “access”, “control” and “service” layers. Creation of new services is frequently time-consuming, and results in redundant functionality, such as separate billing systems for cell and land line phones. As a result, a new horizontal layered concept is being introduced. In a horizontal layered architecture, all the services, such as, voice, video, messaging, etc, share the same access, control and service layers. This approach provides facilities to the service providers for creating, controlling and managing different services easily, avoids redundancy and allows common functions, such as user identification and authentication to be unified.

The service layer determines what services (e.g. voice mail, web browsing, etc.) are available to the users. Intelligence in the service layer in the horizontal layered approach refers to the mechanisms for the dynamic provisioning of different services, including the management of quality of service during the dynamic activation of mulstiple services. Service Layer Intelligence (SLI) provides facilities for making dynamic policy changes which involve or affect different services on the network. SLI benefits both the service providers and the end users. With proper implementation of SLI in the network, service providers are able to create new services easily. SLI ensures dynamic service provisioning, which reduces implementation and maintenance costs. SLI offers end users unified ordering, use and billing for different services and will define interactions between users and service providers for ordering or changing services.

The main goal of this research is to find and assess different architectures for providing service layer intelligence in networks. From the findings from the background literature survey, two architectures have been selected: IMS and Web Services. The current state of the research includes defining a real life scenario related to SLI and implementing that scenario with different architectures. The Scenario is already implemented in IMS using an open source platform. The scenario will be implemented using Web Services, and the two architectures will be compared to each other, based on experience with the scenario.