ABSTRACT
Academician, scientist and technologist are attributing many problems and limitations to the rigidity of the layered approach of the current Internet and therefore many of the existing efforts are found toward the design and development of a network architecture which is flexible in nature. As the future has many unforeseen demands and continuously changing scenarios, therefore the flexibility in the future network architecture assumes much more significance. The chapter deals with the need and vision of flexible network architecture, research issues and challenges, network advancements in this field along with significant issues are explored. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides an easy assembling of a network of service application components along with loosely coupled nature. During the design phase of applications, many requirements of software engineering such as interoperability, reusability, composite applications, flexibility, standardization, abstraction, etc., can be incorporated easily by the use of SOA.
