Web services for communication over IP

This article describes a service-oriented communication (SOC) paradigm based on Web services for real-time communication and converged communication services over IP. This approach extends Web services from a methodology for service integration to a framework for SOC. In particular, we introduce the generic Web services-based application session management (WS-session), the two-way full duplex Web services interaction for communication, and most importantly, the development of Web Services Initiation Protocol. WIP is a full-featured Web services and SOA-based communication paradigm for multimedia and voice communication-over-IP. In the SOC paradigm of WIP, each WIP communication end point may be exposed as a UDDI-publishable Web resource, search-able by Web search engines, and capable of being integrated into a communication-enabled business process as services. We show that WIP provides a SOA that can be extended seamlessly from a primitive P2P end point for voice and video communication to an end point with advanced call control and switching capabilities typically requiring the assistance of a dedicated PBX. A prototype WIP system is fully developed. Architectural design and a system implementation of Web services-based communication are studied and applied to real scenarios of converged communication services. The advance of WIP indicates the beginning of a full Web service and SOA-based communication paradigm that can reshape the direction of communication over IP.