Control-Flow Patterns in Converged Services

Nowadays, telecommunication-services providers have focused their interest in developing new converged services at low cost and fast time to market. For this purpose they have adopted composition approaches, which are based on the reuse of existing software components to create more complex services. However the composition of converged services has so far been done at code level which requires expert knowledge, makes the process tedious and complicated, and causes an increase in design and deployment time. This paper reviews the control-flow patterns supported in converged services, proposes a theoretical basis, and defines the most recurrent control-flow patterns present in these kinds of services.