Today, every modern organization aspires to improve its performance through better use of information technology. Organizations seek to increase their agility and make better, more adaptive responses to changing circumstances. As communication technology improves, organizations can operate over wider distances and can even assemble operational components on an ad hoc basis to meet requirements of a specific objective. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), has rapidly becoming a familiar term and technology that is invading enterprise organizations. While the benefits of a well-suited VoIP system are significant, selecting a VoIP solution for ATC can be a complex decision. As voice service is critical to ATC, one can't afford to implement a technology that compromises quality or reliability. Otherwise, traditional VCS systems are best described as service islands, as they provide most of their features within one site. Only a limited number of services are shared between those sites (e.g. national ACCs), which can be summarized as G/G communication services and radar or flight-plan data exchange. Some of the voice communication services base on digital communication standards (e.g. ATS-QSIG) but the majority is still analogue (MFC-R2). Naturally, the data exchanged between sites is limited. As air-traffic increases the decision making cycles have to be significantly shortened, which indeed needs more information shared between sites. Not only the amount of data but also the criticality and timeliness of data delivery have more importance. This paper discusses a communication architecture that reduces the "network distance" between sites as it offers service access from any place via different network infrastructures. Further the paper elaborates mechanisms needed for a robust and globally interconnected network environment (including infrastructure, systems, processes, and people) in which data is shared timely and seamlessly among users, applications, and platforms. Such an environment enables substantially improved situational awareness and shortened decision making cycles. Stepping ahead, the second topic of our contribution discusses methods to expose services using standard based interfaces. Although multiple methods exist to make services via networks accessible, our suggested policy is adopting but not changing commercial standards for specifying and accessing service interfaces, which is commonly seen as the best approach to achieve service oriented architectures. Open standards are essential, as are the advertisement of the service interfaces in well known and widely accessible "service registries" or discovery services. Access to these registries will be enabled via a set of services available on the network resulting in a loosely coupled service environment. In general, services focus on high-level business processes using standard interfaces.
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