Advances in Next Generation Services and Service Architectures presents state-of-the-art results in services and service architectures, identifies challenges including business models, technology issues, service management, and security, and describes important trends and directions. The book is intended to provide readers with a comprehensive reference for the most current developments in the field. It offers broad coverage of important topics with eighteen chapters covering both technology and applications written by international experts.The chapters are organized into the following four parts:-• Part 1: Emerging Services and Service Architectures - This part provides eight chapters which survey many of the important emerging categories of services, and provides details about architectures, service models, and sample applications.• Part 2: IPTV and Video Services - Video content delivery to a variety of endpoints with varying capacities and network connectivity is a fundamental service. In this part, four chapters address enabling technologies including semantic support, context-awareness, QoE optimization, and support for mobile devices.• Part 3: Context Awareness - User sensitive application delivery has long been viewed as an important capability to increase the value of services to users. Context awareness focuses on representing and using the immediate situation and surroundings of the user in the delivery of the service. In this part, four chapters cover recent progress in context awareness and illustrate its use in next generation networks and IPTV.• Part 4: Security - New types of services and service architectures require new security techniques. This part contains two chapters, one on security challenges and the other on the user of reputation in service management.Advances in Next Generation Services and Service Architectures is complemented by a separate volume, Future Internet Services and Service Architectures, which covers future Internet architectures, peer-to-peer service models, event based processing, and VANETs.Keywords Services, Service Architectures, IPTV, context awareness, smart grids, web 2.0, IMS, security, next-generation networks.

Anand R. Prasad, John F. Buford, Vijay K. Gurbani