Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Service-
Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) were proposed to support the
evolution and composition of services on heterogeneous networking
infrastructures. However, neither SOA nor SOI address the
issues related to the performance of the underlying network
infrastructure. This paper shows that such issues can be mitigated
by supporting the SOA paradigm using cognitive networks, which
are networks that promote continuous adaptation and intelligent
communications, so that transparency to underlying technology,
protocol independence and quality of service can be promoted.