The ability to dynamically compose services is growing in importance. Appreciable network connectivity has become a mandatory part of successful service provisioning. From the end user point-of-view, good experience of networked services is an obligation no matter which network is used. There is an ongoing discussion on Networks of the Future including Future Internet, facing the fact that current Internet and its key protocol IP – located at the waist of the well-known hourglass model – are facing difficulties to cope with (a) the ever-increasing multitude and demands of applications from the top, and (b) the diversity of network access technologies at the bottom. The basic data transport and in particular the implicit control feedback facilities provided by a standard socket interface are by far insufficient for many services. As an example, seamless communication – facing the need to hand over applications and their data traffic between devices and networks without breaks – needs to work around these limitations. During the recent years, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) arose to facilitate the composition of business processes. In their context, network connectivity may be seen as a service itself, provided by a Network Service Component (NSC) that implements a communication function with an Application Programming Interface (API). In order to make service supply chains work as expected such a network service component has to offer well-defined network transport facilities according to agreed-upon Service Level Agreements (SLA). So far, the notion NSC typically appeared in product specifications and patent applications. In literature, Service Components (SC) are typically discussed in the context of (web) service composition, with network connectivity taken for granted. This paper proposes a generic structure of a network service component. It enumerates some early approaches to NSC from the area of seamless communications. The use case of a NSC-based seamless video service is discussed.

Nätverkskomponenter som delar av framtida tjänster beskrivs generellt, och några exempel av redan existerande nätverksfunktioner ges.