Service Oriented Architecture Support in Various Architecture Frameworks: A Brief Review

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising approach used to reduce the time and cost of business solutions in enterprises, and it provides enterprises with agility to respond dynamically to its changing requirements. Therefore, there is a need for great efforts to move agencies and enterprises into systems, such as C4I systems and those that are supported by SOAs. For this reason, numerous Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAFs) have been developed by the architects to enhance the information system development process, System of Systems (SOS) architecture modeling, and in such, to seek for the one that can harness the state-of-the-art elements of SOAs. The main objective of this paper is to explore SOA support in various known Architecture Frameworks (AFs) of the Department of Defense (DoD), such as the United States Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF), British Ministry of Defense Architecture Framework (MoDAF), Department of National Defense and the Canadian Forces Architectural Framework (DNDAF), and NATO Architecture Framework (NAF). Further, this paper describes a comparison among different AFs based on SOA. This analysis will help architects, designers and developers to select the best architecture framework for building SOA-based C4I solutions.